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Nov. 22nd, 2013 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyOutcast Mother’s Death, and Questions About Jewish Sect’s Sway Over Children
http://nyti.ms/1h5DAY6
BRIDGETON, N.J. — Abe Weiss came home on the last Friday in September to find the lifeless body of his girlfriend, Deb Tambor, on the bedroom floor of their ranch house here.
Her body was propped up against the bed; underneath lay a bag of pills and a half-empty bottle of vodka. Nearby were photographs of the woman’s three increasingly estranged children, including a snapshot of the eldest, Chaya, 13, at her elementary school graduation.
Mr. Weiss said Ms. Tambor had written a telling diary entry after Chaya refused to accept her graduation gift of a bouquet.
“I’m done living,” the entry said. “I can’t take the pain. People say give it a shot. But it’s not working. I’m done.”
Ms. Tambor, 33, had forsaken the Hasidic Jewish world in which she was raised and married, a decision that undermined her relationship with her children. Her Skver Hasidic sect in Rockland County, N.Y., was concerned that Ms. Tambor’s freer lifestyle might be a subversive influence on the children, and whether it swayed the children to keep their distance and limited her opportunities to visit has become an emotionally charged question in wider Jewish circles.
Articles in The Forward, The Jewish Week and the online magazine Tablet and on blogs run by Hasidic defectors, like Failed Messiah, have detailed the agonizing challenges facing those who leave the insular world of Hasidim, where dress is austere, the language is Yiddish and religious obligations structure each day.
Former Hasidim seeking child custody arrangements find that rabbis, community leaders and Orthodox Jewish family therapists line up with money and witnesses behind the Hasidic spouse. Such influence is especially powerful in a place like Rockland, a county near New York City where one-third of the residents are Jewish.
Lani Santo, executive director of the decade-old Footsteps, an organization that has offered support to more than 800 Hasidic exiles, called Ms. Tambor’s death “a tipping point.”
“People are seeing there’s a possibility of losing their children because the Orthodox community thinks it needs to protect each child’s Jewish soul,” Ms. Santo said, “and will go to great lengths to sever ties between the child and the parents leaving to become more modern.”
Given how wrenching to one’s identity throwing off the Hasidic way of life can be, she said, “suicidality is really an issue that haunts many of our members.”
The causes of suicide are complex, experts say, and it seldom can be attributed to a single event. Ms. Tambor did not leave a note, and the official cause of her death is awaiting toxicology tests.
Even before she divorced and had to work out custody arrangements to see her children, she had a troubled history that included depression and, according to friends, sexual abuse by a relative. But Ms. Tambor’s friends and supporters say her alienation from her children weighed most heavily, and for that they blame her family and the rest of the Hasidic community she left behind.
A spokesman for the sect would not comment and another did not respond to messages.
Ms. Tambor’s ex-husband, Moshe Dirnfeld, declined to comment.
Yeedle Melber, a cousin of Mr. Dirnfeld, said close family members had told him that Ms. Tambor began to have mental problems several years ago after she was struck by a car. There followed an attempt to take her own life during the marriage and hospitalization for five months at Rockland Psychiatric Center.
“She became unbalanced,” said Mr. Melber, who is Hasidic. “Her husband tried everything in his power to hold things together. She started going in a bad direction. There was a feeling the kids are not safe with her because of mental issues.”
But Mr. Weiss and friends of Ms. Tambor said her psychological issues had been exacerbated by the way she was treated. One friend, Shulem Deen, a divorced father who had also left the Skver sect, wrote an essay for Tablet comparing Ms. Tambor’s ordeal to his own estrangement from his five children.
“I was unaware that my relatively meager resources were no match for a powerfully resourceful community with an ideological stake in the future of my children,” Mr. Deen wrote. “Most of all I was naïve about the powers of religious extremism to control the minds of children themselves.”
The article describes how the children “grew withdrawn in my presence, eating dinner in silence and refusing the books and games I bought them,” and inspecting foods he offered to be sure they were kosher.
“Mommy says you want to turn us into goyim,” he said a son told him, using the Yiddish term for non-Jews.
Mr. Deen has not seen his two eldest children in five years, and the next two eldest stopped allowing visits after they turned 13. His youngest son, now 11, sees him grudgingly.
Family Court records are sealed. But an official in the state courts familiar with the Tambor case, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said decisions in the children’s custody were based entirely on Ms. Tambor’s mercurial behavior and the previous suicide attempt.
“There was a unanimous feeling that the mother was in no shape to get custody or even unsupervised visits,” the official said. “The fact that she tragically took her own life is the clearest indication that what the experts said about her psychiatric problems was right.”
Once someone leaves a sect, he or she often becomes a pariah, virtually disowned by parents and siblings, Hasidic exiles say. Hasidim realize it is important for a child to know a mother or a father, but, Mr. Deen said, they think they can remedy the absence “by getting the religious spouse to remarry.”
One confidant who recorded interviews with Ms. Tambor and spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to draw attention to himself said Ms. Tambor had told him that she did not want to leave the Skver sect but was forced out because she had accused an uncle of molesting her. Mr. Weiss and other friends also said Ms. Tambor had told them of the abuse.
Ms. Tambor, a dark-haired woman with a broad smile, was the daughter of a yeshiva principal in New Square, a Rockland County enclave of over 7,000 residents, all Hasidic, that was established as a village in 1961 to maintain its insularity, a place where men and women walk on opposite sides of the street to avoid mingling.
After leaving the sect four years ago, Ms. Tambor moved to New City and got her first driver’s license. She supported herself through Social Security payments for her mental disability and took courses at Rockland Community College. She no longer kept kosher or observed Sabbath, and became an avid Yankees fan — something that would be an aberration for a Hasid because sports are generally discouraged as a distraction from a pious life. Nine months ago she started living here in Bridgeton, in southern New Jersey, with Mr. Weiss, 38, another former Skver Hasid she had met on Facebook.
“She was a beautiful woman with a heart of gold and we really loved each other,” Mr. Weiss said.
He doubted that the car accident mentioned by Mr. Melber, the cousin of Ms. Tambor’s ex-husband, had caused psychological problems because, he said, she injured her leg, not her head.
“It’s all part of the cover-up of sexual abuse,” he said.
While she was in the psychiatric hospital, her husband obtained a divorce and custody of their three children, now ages 10, 11 and 13. Initially, Mr. Weiss said, she was allowed a supervised visit once a month at a therapist’s office. By this past summer, she was allowed to see the children twice a month at a sister’s home in Monsey, a Rockland County community almost a three-hour drive from Bridgeton.
Mr. Deen said Ms. Tambor had told him that she felt humiliated because the children called her Devorah and called their stepmother Mommy. A son answered her questions with a resentful yes or no.
“Do you know how it hurts to hear your kid say they don’t want to see you?” Ms. Tambor wrote on Facebook.
Two days after her death, Mr. Weiss and friends gathered in New Square, hoping to attend her funeral. Eventually, two of Ms. Tambor’s brothers picked Mr. Weiss up and took him to a minivan parked outside the village. Inside the vehicle was the coffin for him to view.
The next morning he learned in a text message that Ms. Tambor was being buried at that moment in a cemetery on Long Island. It was too late for him to be there.
Service Members Left Vulnerable to Payday Loans
http://nyti.ms/1bWa5nT
Petty Officer First Class Vernaye Kelly winces when roughly $350 is automatically deducted from her Navy paycheck twice a month.
Month after month, the money goes to cover payments on loans with annual interest rates of nearly 40 percent. The monthly scramble — the scrimping, saving and going without — is a familiar one to her. More than a decade ago, she received her first payday loan to pay for moving expenses while her husband, a staff sergeant in the Marines, was deployed in Iraq.
Alarmed that payday lenders were preying on military members, Congress in 2006 passed a law intended to shield servicemen and women from the loans tied to a borrower’s next paycheck, which come with double-digit interest rates and can plunge customers into debt. But the law failed to help Ms. Kelly, 30, this year.
Nearly seven years since the Military Lending Act came into effect, government authorities say the law has gaps that threaten to leave hundreds of thousands of service members across the country vulnerable to potentially predatory loans — from credit pitched by retailers to pay for electronics or furniture, to auto-title loans to payday-style loans. The law, the authorities say, has not kept pace with high-interest lenders that focus on servicemen and women, both online and near bases.
“Somebody has to start caring,” said Ms. Kelly, who took out another payday loan with double-digit interest rates when her car broke down in 2005 and a couple more loans this summer to cover her existing payments. “I’m worried about the sailors who are coming up behind me.”
The short-term loans not covered under the law’s interest rate cap of 36 percent include loans for more than $2,000, loans that last for more than 91 days and auto-title loans with terms longer than 181 days.
While it is difficult to determine how many members of the military are struggling with loans not covered by the law, interviews with military charities in five states and more than two dozen service members — many of whom declined to be named for fear that disclosing their identity would cost them their security clearances — indicate that the problem is spreading.
“Service members just get trapped in an endless cycle of debt,” said Michael S. Archer, director of military legal assistance for the Marine Corps Installations East.
Shouldering the loans can catapult service members into foreclosure and imperil their jobs, as the military considers high personal indebtedness a threat to national security. The concern is that service members overwhelmed by debt might be more likely to accept financial inducements to commit espionage.
The Military Lending Act followed a series of articles in The New York Times in 2004 that documented problems in the sale of life insurance and other financial products. Those problems were also highlighted in congressional hearings and reports from the Government Accountability Office. The 2006 law was meant to stamp out the most dangerous products while ensuring that service members did not lose access to credit entirely.
“The law did wonders for the products that it covered, but there are simply many products that it doesn’t cover,” Holly K. Petraeus, the assistant director for service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in an interview.
Short-term lenders argue that when used prudently, their loans can be a valuable tool for customers who might not otherwise have access to traditional banking services.
Yet government agencies are now scrutinizing some of these financial products, including installment loans, which have longer repayment periods — six to 36 months — than a typical payday loan.
There is a growing momentum in Washington to act. On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee convened a hearing on abusive military lending. And the Defense Department has begun soliciting public feedback on whether the protections of the Military Lending Act should be expanded to include other types of loans.
“Federal protections are still insufficient” to protect the military, said Senator Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Commerce Committee.
Interest rates on the loans offered by companies like Just Military Loans and Military Financial, can exceed 80 percent, according to an analysis by the Consumer Federation of America.
Pioneer Financial and Omni Military Loans, which dominated the military business before the passage of the 2006 law, now offer products that fall into its gaps. These two companies and others pitch loans for more than $2,000 — the amount of money covered under the law — or simply make loans beyond the 91-day period covered, according to a review by The Times of more than three dozen loan contracts held by the service members interviewed.
Omni and Military Financial did not respond to requests for comment.
Joe Freeman, Pioneer’s president, said in a statement that none of its loans had interest rates above 36 percent.
For short-term lenders, the military, made up of many young, financially inexperienced people, is an attractive customer base, especially because they have reliable paychecks, a rarity in lean economic times. And a fixture of military life makes it even easier for lenders to collect.
Under the so-called allotment system, service members can have the military siphon off money from their paychecks before the cash hits their accounts. Service members often agree to use the allotment system to cover their monthly payments.
Even lenders acknowledge that the allotment system helps keep service member defaults low.
“We have very good success because they are able to pay us back through their paycheck in the form of the allotment,” said Rick Rosen, who was a manager at a Pioneer Services branch that was situated near the main entrance to Fort Bliss, Tex., one of the nation’s largest bases. During an interview earlier this year outside the branch, which has since been closed, Mr. Rosen emphasized that soldiers could choose whether to pay through allotment.
Service members say, though, that they had no choice. Nikea Dawkins, a 23-year-old sergeant in the Army, said she had to agree to pay her $1,500 loan from Pioneer through allotment. “There was no way that they would give the loan to me unless I agreed,” she said.
Some lenders, military members say, use threats to ensure that they are repaid. The service members said they were told that if they fell behind, the lenders would go to their commanding officers.
The warning can be enough to induce military members to borrow more money to cover their existing loans. Since taking out her first loan with Pioneer in 2002, for example, Ms. Kelly said she and her husband had together taken out four more loans, from lenders including Military Financial and Patriot Loans.
Such official-sounding company names — along with advertisements featuring men and women in uniform — can lull service members into believing that the loans are friendlier for the military, according to Dave Faraldo, the director the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society office in Jacksonville, Fla.
It’s a simple mistake to make.
“We know the military because we are former military,” Omni says on its website. “Most of our loan specialists are former military personnel who have been in your shoes.”
Others try to persuade military members to pitch the loans to their friends, offering a $25 referral fee or a Starbucks gift card, according to service members. Some lenders have thrown loan parties near bases, drawing people with the promise of free Buffalo wings, service members say.
The sheer availability of the loans can make it tough to abstain. Ana Hernandez, who oversees the so-called financial readiness program at Fort Bliss, says that soldiers on the base readily take out loans to buy things like electronic goods. “They are loans for wants, not for necessities at all,” she said.
Mentally Ill, and Jailed in Isolation at Rikers Island
http://nyti.ms/18mdNXd
From the annals of Rikers Island comes a document titled, “Three Adolescents With Mental Illness in Punitive Segregation in Rikers Island.” Punitive segregation means solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Schoolwork, if it comes, is passed through a slot in the cell door. Toothpaste is available once a day.
Rikers Island exists to make the rest of New York City seem blissful; there, troublemakers, troubled people and the unlucky are hidden behind a cloak of invisibility. It is a campus of jails for people arrested and awaiting trial, or others serving sentences of less than a year. Also, it is the basket into which society drops the disruptive mentally ill.
More than most jail systems, New York City has made extensive use of “punitive segregation” in recent years. Of the people put into solitary confinement, a high percentage have mental illness. On July 23, for instance, 102 of the 140 teenagers in solitary were either seriously or moderately mentally ill, according to a consultant’s report prepared for the city’s Board of Correction.
Few government agencies are subjected to candid oversight, but the city’s Correction Department is an exception. It faces a board that includes mayoral appointees but is controlled by no single politician. The board’s reports are blunt and lack the sanitized spin of most government documents.
The board’s staff prepared the report on the three mentally ill teenagers, each of whom was doing more than 200 days in solitary. Such segregation is a measure most often used to protect other detainees and prison staff when a person is dangerous or violent. But it comes at a steep cost: Even for people with no history of mental health problems, the prolonged isolation can lead to hallucinations, the consultants stated. Among those who are already ill, solitary accelerates existing psychiatric problems and makes treatment very difficult.
One of the three teenagers in the report was a detainee identified only as “Matthew,” 17, with bipolar disorder. He had been sentenced to 250 days in punitive segregation for punching a correction captain in the face. Four other members of his immediate family were also found to have bipolar disorder. The father’s only known job was drug dealer. His mother was a home health aide who worked two jobs. After two months in solitary at Rikers, Matthew had gone to two individual therapy sessions. He did not make other appointments for the following reasons, the report found: a search was underway for contraband in his area; no mental health escort to bring him to the therapy room; multiple floods; an episode involving “use of force” in the area; his refusal on one occasion to leave the cell.
An 18-year-old detainee, “Carlos,” who had depression, was also profiled in the report. He arrived in jail owing 150 days in solitary from a prior incarceration — time that remained on his account when he was released. On his return, Carlos was paying it backward.
“He and his family have had multiple encounters with the criminal justice system,” the report stated. “His earliest memory of the police goes back to his fourth birthday party, when police raided the family’s home to look for his father and drugs. Carlos said that his father did not attend his fourth birthday party because a police officer had tipped him off to the scheduled raid.”
When he was 8, his father was sent to prison, and his mother told him that he was gone “because he was a construction worker doing post-9/11 construction at ground zero.”
Between 2007 and the end of June 2013, the consultants reported, the number of punitive segregation beds increased by about 62 percent, to 998 from 614. For the last year, the board has been critical of the increase, and the city correction commissioner, Dora B. Schriro, said she was working to shift detainees into better spaces. By September, though, the board decided that rules limiting the use of solitary were essential: It voted 9 to 0 in favor of the rules. This week, the city reported that it had reduced the number of solitary cells by 17 percent in October, and was continuing the reduction into November.
As it happens, the city has drastically reduced the Police Department’s use of the stop-and-frisk tactic under pressure of a lawsuit. “What went on in Corrections looks very similar,” Dr. Bobby Cohen, a member of the board, said.
The department spokesman did not respond to messages Tuesday seeking comment. But the reductions in solitary, Commissioner Schriro said, was the fruit of long-planned strategies.
“Whatever the reason is,” Dr. Cohen said, “I’m glad they’re reducing the numbers.”
Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid
http://nyti.ms/1am67Ve
Humans have no exclusive claim on intelligence. Across the animal kingdom, all sorts of creatures have performed impressive intellectual feats. A bonobo named Kanzi uses an array of symbols to communicate with humans. Chaser the border collie knows the English words for more than 1,000 objects. Crows make sophisticated tools, elephants recognize themselves in the mirror, and dolphins have a rudimentary number sense.
And reptiles? Well, at least they have their looks.
In the plethora of research over the past few decades on the cognitive capabilities of various species, lizards, turtles and snakes have been left in the back of the class. Few scientists bothered to peer into the reptile mind, and those who did were largely unimpressed.
“Reptiles don’t really have great press,” said Gordon M. Burghardt, a comparative psychologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “Certainly in the past, people didn’t really think too much of their intelligence. They were thought of as instinct machines.” But now that is beginning to change, thanks to a growing interest in “coldblooded cognition” and recent studies revealing that reptile brains are not as primitive as we imagined. The research could not only redeem reptiles but also shed new light on cognitive evolution.
Because reptiles, birds and mammals diverged so long ago, with a common ancestor that lived 280 million years ago, the emerging data suggest that certain sophisticated mental skills may be more ancient than had been assumed — or so adaptive that they evolved multiple times.
For evidence of reptilian intelligence, one need look no further than the maze, a time-honored laboratory test. Anna Wilkinson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lincoln in England, tested a female red-footed tortoise named Moses in the radial arm maze, which has eight spokes radiating out from a central platform. Moses’ task was to “solve” the maze as efficiently as possible: to snatch a piece of strawberry from the end of each arm without returning to one she had already visited.
“That requires quite a memory load because you have to remember where you’ve been,” Dr. Wilkinson said.
Moses managed admirably, performing significantly better than if she had been choosing arms at random. Further investigation revealed that she was not using smell to find the treats. Instead, she seemed to be using external landmarks to navigate, just as mammals do.
Things became even more interesting when Dr. Wilkinson hung a black curtain around the maze, depriving Moses of the rich environmental cues that had surrounded her. The tortoise adopted a new navigational strategy, exploring the maze systematically by entering whatever arm was directly adjacent to the one she had just left. This approach is “an enormously great” way of solving the task, Dr. Wilkinson said, and a strategy rarely seen in mammals.
Navigational skills are important, but the research also hints at something even more impressive: behavioral flexibility, or the ability to alter one’s behavior as external circumstances change. This flexibility, which allows animals to take advantage of new environments or food sources, has been well documented in birds and primates, and scientists are now beginning to believe that it exists in reptiles, too.
Anole, a tropical lizard, have a very specific method of acquiring food, striking at moving prey from above. But Manuel S. Leal, a biologist at Duke University, created a situation in which this strategy simply would not work, hiding a tasty insect larva inside a small hole and covering the hole with a tightfitting blue cap.
Two of the six lizards he tested tried to extract the treat by attacking the blue disk from above, to no avail. But the other four puzzled out new approaches. Two lizards came at the disk sideways, using their mouths to bite and lift it, while the others used their snouts as levers to pry it off the baited well.
Then Dr. Leal increased the difficulty by hiding the larvae under a new cap, this one blue and yellow. He used the solid blue disk to cover an adjacent, empty well. In tests of four lizards, two recognized the switch and learned that getting the bait now required flipping the multicolored disk instead of the blue one.
Other studies have documented similar levels of flexibility and problem solving. Dr. Burghardt, for instance, presented monitor lizards with an utterly unfamiliar apparatus, a clear plastic tube with two hinged doors and several live mice inside. The lizards rapidly figured out how to rotate the tube and open the doors to capture the prey. “It really amazed us that they all solved the problem very quickly and then did much better the second time,” Dr. Burghardt said. “That’s a sign of real learning.”
So how did we miss this for so long? Scientists say that many early studies of reptile cognition, conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, had critical design flaws.
By using experiments originally designed for mammals, researchers may have been setting reptiles up for failure. For instance, scientists commonly use “aversive stimuli,” such as loud sounds and bright lights, to shape rodent behavior. But reptiles respond to many of these stimuli by freezing, thereby not performing.
Scientists may also have been asking reptiles to perform impossible tasks. Lizards do not use their legs to manipulate objects, Dr. Leal said, “so you cannot develop an experiment where you’re expecting them to unwrap a box, for example.”
What’s more, because they are coldblooded, reptiles are particularly sensitive to environmental conditions. Rats and mice can run a maze just fine in a 70-degree lab, but many reptilian species need a much warmer environment — with air temperatures in the mid-80s or 90s. “They seem to learn the quickest at body temperatures that are very uncomfortable for us,” Dr. Burghardt said.
Now that scientists have gotten better at designing experiments for reptiles, they are uncovering all kinds of surprising abilities. Some of the most intriguing work involves social learning. The conventional wisdom is that because reptiles are largely solitary, asocial creatures, they are incapable of learning through observation.
New research calls that assumption into question. In another study of red-footed tortoises, Dr. Wilkinson deposited a tortoise on one side of a wire fence and a piece of strawberry on the other, in sight but just out of reach. To get their snouts on the treat, the tortoises needed to take a long detour around the edge of the fence.
Not one tortoise figured this out on its own. (Unable to reach the reward, some of the animals simply decided to nap.) But when they watched a trained tortoise navigate around the fence, all the observers learned to follow suit.
Other studies of reptiles have turned up similar results, challenging the popular theory that social learning evolved as a byproduct of — and a special adaptation for — group living. Instead, Dr. Wilkinson said, social learning may be merely an outgrowth of an animal’s general ability to learn.
The field of reptile cognition is in its infancy, but it already suggests that “intelligence” may be more widely distributed through the animal kingdom than had been imagined. As Dr. Burghardt put it, “People are starting to take some of the tests that were developed for the ‘smart’ animals and adapting them to use with other species, and finding that the ‘smart’ animals may not be so special.”
Voter Suppression’s New Pretext
http://nyti.ms/1ihvaw2
IRVINE, Calif. — IT’S the latest fad among state officials looking to make voting harder: We’re not racist, we’re just partisan.
Some background: In June, the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, under which nine states and portions of others had to get federal approval before changing their election laws.
One of those states, Texas, is again in court, facing a Justice Department suit seeking to get the state under federal oversight again. To do so, the Justice Department must prove intentional racial discrimination.
Texas’ defense? It’s discrimination, all right — but it’s on the basis of party, not race, and therefore it’s O.K.
Says Texas: “It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates.”
Leaving aside that whopper — laws that dilute black and Hispanic voting power have more than an “incidental” impact — the statement, part of a court filing in August, was pretty brazen. Minority voters, in Texas and elsewhere, tend to support Democrats. So Republican officials, especially but not only in the South, want to reduce early voting; impose voter-identification requirements; restrict voter registration; and, critically, draw districts either to crowd as many minority voters into as few districts as possible, or dilute concentrations of minority voters by dispersing them into as many white-controlled districts as possible.
The Supreme Court decision unleashed all manner of new efforts to suppress minority voting — and a new batch of legal challenges.
Just this week, a federal judge in Milwaukee considered whether Wisconsin’s tough new voter-ID law violates the 1965 law by placing illegal burdens on minority voters. As in the Texas suit, the Justice Department has sued North Carolina, which in August passed the toughest set of voting rules since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the law was passed with racist intent. If successful, Texas and North Carolina could be put back under federal supervision.
Unlike with race-based discrimination, which, if proved, could violate both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, the Supreme Court has refused to recognize a standard for policing even nakedly partisan gerrymandering.
But now, supporters of strict voter-ID, registration and other voting laws are trying to use the same defense they have used to defend gerrymandering. They can claim ostensibly good reasons for their laws: preventing fraud or saving money. As a fallback, they can claim, like Texas, they are engaged in permissible partisan discrimination, not impermissible race discrimination.
But this is specious. First, it is artificial to separate race and party under current political conditions. When Don Yelton, a Republican official in North Carolina, recently told “The Daily Show” that if the state’s strict new voter-ID law “hurts a bunch of lazy blacks,” then “so be it,” it was easy to see old-fashioned Southern racism. But just as significant was Mr. Yelton’s saying that the new law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.”
Second, courts should alleviate unnecessary burdens on voters whatever the state’s asserted motive. The Supreme Court has said that, in redistricting, it cannot distinguish between permissible partisan considerations (for example, grouping “communities of interest”) and unconstitutional gerrymandering. But outside redistricting, partisanship has no place. Our elections should be conducted such that all eligible voters (and only eligible voters) can easily register, and cast a vote that will be accurately counted.
Few states will be as bold as Texas and admit naked partisanship. Most will engage in polite obfuscation.
Federal judges should see through these cynical pretexts. They should hold that when a state passes a law that burdens voters, it must demonstrate, with credible evidence, that the burdens are justified by a good reason and that the laws are tailored to their intended purpose. When North Carolina says it needs a strict voter-ID law to prevent fraud, courts should be skeptical, both because such laws haven’t been found to stop much impersonation fraud (there isn’t a lot) and because the same law eased absentee voting, which increases the risk of fraud.
Shifting the debate away from the “race versus party” question toward protecting voters has many virtues. The Supreme Court isn’t interested in expanding race-based remedies these days, and the Justice Department’s suits against North Carolina and Texas face an uphill battle. Yet the justices might well find a voter protection principle appealing. In 2012, lower courts started to push back against Republican overreach in voting laws. Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge in Chicago, recently expressed doubts about having upheld Indiana’s voter-ID law, which he now sees as a means of voter suppression. The pivotal swing vote on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, also seems troubled by partisan considerations in state election law.
If courts accepted my proposal to protect all voters, the Justice Department would not have to prove some legislators are racists. It would give new life to the goals of the Voting Rights Act and would protect not only minorities, but also other populations — for example, college students, who appear to bear the brunt of voter-ID laws.
If Republican legislatures were full of Don Yeltons who mouth off to “The Daily Show,” proving a racial motivation would be easy. But they are not, and we need a new tool beyond race or party to protect everyone’s voting rights.
http://nyti.ms/1h5DAY6
BRIDGETON, N.J. — Abe Weiss came home on the last Friday in September to find the lifeless body of his girlfriend, Deb Tambor, on the bedroom floor of their ranch house here.
Her body was propped up against the bed; underneath lay a bag of pills and a half-empty bottle of vodka. Nearby were photographs of the woman’s three increasingly estranged children, including a snapshot of the eldest, Chaya, 13, at her elementary school graduation.
Mr. Weiss said Ms. Tambor had written a telling diary entry after Chaya refused to accept her graduation gift of a bouquet.
“I’m done living,” the entry said. “I can’t take the pain. People say give it a shot. But it’s not working. I’m done.”
Ms. Tambor, 33, had forsaken the Hasidic Jewish world in which she was raised and married, a decision that undermined her relationship with her children. Her Skver Hasidic sect in Rockland County, N.Y., was concerned that Ms. Tambor’s freer lifestyle might be a subversive influence on the children, and whether it swayed the children to keep their distance and limited her opportunities to visit has become an emotionally charged question in wider Jewish circles.
Articles in The Forward, The Jewish Week and the online magazine Tablet and on blogs run by Hasidic defectors, like Failed Messiah, have detailed the agonizing challenges facing those who leave the insular world of Hasidim, where dress is austere, the language is Yiddish and religious obligations structure each day.
Former Hasidim seeking child custody arrangements find that rabbis, community leaders and Orthodox Jewish family therapists line up with money and witnesses behind the Hasidic spouse. Such influence is especially powerful in a place like Rockland, a county near New York City where one-third of the residents are Jewish.
Lani Santo, executive director of the decade-old Footsteps, an organization that has offered support to more than 800 Hasidic exiles, called Ms. Tambor’s death “a tipping point.”
“People are seeing there’s a possibility of losing their children because the Orthodox community thinks it needs to protect each child’s Jewish soul,” Ms. Santo said, “and will go to great lengths to sever ties between the child and the parents leaving to become more modern.”
Given how wrenching to one’s identity throwing off the Hasidic way of life can be, she said, “suicidality is really an issue that haunts many of our members.”
The causes of suicide are complex, experts say, and it seldom can be attributed to a single event. Ms. Tambor did not leave a note, and the official cause of her death is awaiting toxicology tests.
Even before she divorced and had to work out custody arrangements to see her children, she had a troubled history that included depression and, according to friends, sexual abuse by a relative. But Ms. Tambor’s friends and supporters say her alienation from her children weighed most heavily, and for that they blame her family and the rest of the Hasidic community she left behind.
A spokesman for the sect would not comment and another did not respond to messages.
Ms. Tambor’s ex-husband, Moshe Dirnfeld, declined to comment.
Yeedle Melber, a cousin of Mr. Dirnfeld, said close family members had told him that Ms. Tambor began to have mental problems several years ago after she was struck by a car. There followed an attempt to take her own life during the marriage and hospitalization for five months at Rockland Psychiatric Center.
“She became unbalanced,” said Mr. Melber, who is Hasidic. “Her husband tried everything in his power to hold things together. She started going in a bad direction. There was a feeling the kids are not safe with her because of mental issues.”
But Mr. Weiss and friends of Ms. Tambor said her psychological issues had been exacerbated by the way she was treated. One friend, Shulem Deen, a divorced father who had also left the Skver sect, wrote an essay for Tablet comparing Ms. Tambor’s ordeal to his own estrangement from his five children.
“I was unaware that my relatively meager resources were no match for a powerfully resourceful community with an ideological stake in the future of my children,” Mr. Deen wrote. “Most of all I was naïve about the powers of religious extremism to control the minds of children themselves.”
The article describes how the children “grew withdrawn in my presence, eating dinner in silence and refusing the books and games I bought them,” and inspecting foods he offered to be sure they were kosher.
“Mommy says you want to turn us into goyim,” he said a son told him, using the Yiddish term for non-Jews.
Mr. Deen has not seen his two eldest children in five years, and the next two eldest stopped allowing visits after they turned 13. His youngest son, now 11, sees him grudgingly.
Family Court records are sealed. But an official in the state courts familiar with the Tambor case, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said decisions in the children’s custody were based entirely on Ms. Tambor’s mercurial behavior and the previous suicide attempt.
“There was a unanimous feeling that the mother was in no shape to get custody or even unsupervised visits,” the official said. “The fact that she tragically took her own life is the clearest indication that what the experts said about her psychiatric problems was right.”
Once someone leaves a sect, he or she often becomes a pariah, virtually disowned by parents and siblings, Hasidic exiles say. Hasidim realize it is important for a child to know a mother or a father, but, Mr. Deen said, they think they can remedy the absence “by getting the religious spouse to remarry.”
One confidant who recorded interviews with Ms. Tambor and spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to draw attention to himself said Ms. Tambor had told him that she did not want to leave the Skver sect but was forced out because she had accused an uncle of molesting her. Mr. Weiss and other friends also said Ms. Tambor had told them of the abuse.
Ms. Tambor, a dark-haired woman with a broad smile, was the daughter of a yeshiva principal in New Square, a Rockland County enclave of over 7,000 residents, all Hasidic, that was established as a village in 1961 to maintain its insularity, a place where men and women walk on opposite sides of the street to avoid mingling.
After leaving the sect four years ago, Ms. Tambor moved to New City and got her first driver’s license. She supported herself through Social Security payments for her mental disability and took courses at Rockland Community College. She no longer kept kosher or observed Sabbath, and became an avid Yankees fan — something that would be an aberration for a Hasid because sports are generally discouraged as a distraction from a pious life. Nine months ago she started living here in Bridgeton, in southern New Jersey, with Mr. Weiss, 38, another former Skver Hasid she had met on Facebook.
“She was a beautiful woman with a heart of gold and we really loved each other,” Mr. Weiss said.
He doubted that the car accident mentioned by Mr. Melber, the cousin of Ms. Tambor’s ex-husband, had caused psychological problems because, he said, she injured her leg, not her head.
“It’s all part of the cover-up of sexual abuse,” he said.
While she was in the psychiatric hospital, her husband obtained a divorce and custody of their three children, now ages 10, 11 and 13. Initially, Mr. Weiss said, she was allowed a supervised visit once a month at a therapist’s office. By this past summer, she was allowed to see the children twice a month at a sister’s home in Monsey, a Rockland County community almost a three-hour drive from Bridgeton.
Mr. Deen said Ms. Tambor had told him that she felt humiliated because the children called her Devorah and called their stepmother Mommy. A son answered her questions with a resentful yes or no.
“Do you know how it hurts to hear your kid say they don’t want to see you?” Ms. Tambor wrote on Facebook.
Two days after her death, Mr. Weiss and friends gathered in New Square, hoping to attend her funeral. Eventually, two of Ms. Tambor’s brothers picked Mr. Weiss up and took him to a minivan parked outside the village. Inside the vehicle was the coffin for him to view.
The next morning he learned in a text message that Ms. Tambor was being buried at that moment in a cemetery on Long Island. It was too late for him to be there.
Service Members Left Vulnerable to Payday Loans
http://nyti.ms/1bWa5nT
Petty Officer First Class Vernaye Kelly winces when roughly $350 is automatically deducted from her Navy paycheck twice a month.
Month after month, the money goes to cover payments on loans with annual interest rates of nearly 40 percent. The monthly scramble — the scrimping, saving and going without — is a familiar one to her. More than a decade ago, she received her first payday loan to pay for moving expenses while her husband, a staff sergeant in the Marines, was deployed in Iraq.
Alarmed that payday lenders were preying on military members, Congress in 2006 passed a law intended to shield servicemen and women from the loans tied to a borrower’s next paycheck, which come with double-digit interest rates and can plunge customers into debt. But the law failed to help Ms. Kelly, 30, this year.
Nearly seven years since the Military Lending Act came into effect, government authorities say the law has gaps that threaten to leave hundreds of thousands of service members across the country vulnerable to potentially predatory loans — from credit pitched by retailers to pay for electronics or furniture, to auto-title loans to payday-style loans. The law, the authorities say, has not kept pace with high-interest lenders that focus on servicemen and women, both online and near bases.
“Somebody has to start caring,” said Ms. Kelly, who took out another payday loan with double-digit interest rates when her car broke down in 2005 and a couple more loans this summer to cover her existing payments. “I’m worried about the sailors who are coming up behind me.”
The short-term loans not covered under the law’s interest rate cap of 36 percent include loans for more than $2,000, loans that last for more than 91 days and auto-title loans with terms longer than 181 days.
While it is difficult to determine how many members of the military are struggling with loans not covered by the law, interviews with military charities in five states and more than two dozen service members — many of whom declined to be named for fear that disclosing their identity would cost them their security clearances — indicate that the problem is spreading.
“Service members just get trapped in an endless cycle of debt,” said Michael S. Archer, director of military legal assistance for the Marine Corps Installations East.
Shouldering the loans can catapult service members into foreclosure and imperil their jobs, as the military considers high personal indebtedness a threat to national security. The concern is that service members overwhelmed by debt might be more likely to accept financial inducements to commit espionage.
The Military Lending Act followed a series of articles in The New York Times in 2004 that documented problems in the sale of life insurance and other financial products. Those problems were also highlighted in congressional hearings and reports from the Government Accountability Office. The 2006 law was meant to stamp out the most dangerous products while ensuring that service members did not lose access to credit entirely.
“The law did wonders for the products that it covered, but there are simply many products that it doesn’t cover,” Holly K. Petraeus, the assistant director for service member affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said in an interview.
Short-term lenders argue that when used prudently, their loans can be a valuable tool for customers who might not otherwise have access to traditional banking services.
Yet government agencies are now scrutinizing some of these financial products, including installment loans, which have longer repayment periods — six to 36 months — than a typical payday loan.
There is a growing momentum in Washington to act. On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee convened a hearing on abusive military lending. And the Defense Department has begun soliciting public feedback on whether the protections of the Military Lending Act should be expanded to include other types of loans.
“Federal protections are still insufficient” to protect the military, said Senator Jay Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Commerce Committee.
Interest rates on the loans offered by companies like Just Military Loans and Military Financial, can exceed 80 percent, according to an analysis by the Consumer Federation of America.
Pioneer Financial and Omni Military Loans, which dominated the military business before the passage of the 2006 law, now offer products that fall into its gaps. These two companies and others pitch loans for more than $2,000 — the amount of money covered under the law — or simply make loans beyond the 91-day period covered, according to a review by The Times of more than three dozen loan contracts held by the service members interviewed.
Omni and Military Financial did not respond to requests for comment.
Joe Freeman, Pioneer’s president, said in a statement that none of its loans had interest rates above 36 percent.
For short-term lenders, the military, made up of many young, financially inexperienced people, is an attractive customer base, especially because they have reliable paychecks, a rarity in lean economic times. And a fixture of military life makes it even easier for lenders to collect.
Under the so-called allotment system, service members can have the military siphon off money from their paychecks before the cash hits their accounts. Service members often agree to use the allotment system to cover their monthly payments.
Even lenders acknowledge that the allotment system helps keep service member defaults low.
“We have very good success because they are able to pay us back through their paycheck in the form of the allotment,” said Rick Rosen, who was a manager at a Pioneer Services branch that was situated near the main entrance to Fort Bliss, Tex., one of the nation’s largest bases. During an interview earlier this year outside the branch, which has since been closed, Mr. Rosen emphasized that soldiers could choose whether to pay through allotment.
Service members say, though, that they had no choice. Nikea Dawkins, a 23-year-old sergeant in the Army, said she had to agree to pay her $1,500 loan from Pioneer through allotment. “There was no way that they would give the loan to me unless I agreed,” she said.
Some lenders, military members say, use threats to ensure that they are repaid. The service members said they were told that if they fell behind, the lenders would go to their commanding officers.
The warning can be enough to induce military members to borrow more money to cover their existing loans. Since taking out her first loan with Pioneer in 2002, for example, Ms. Kelly said she and her husband had together taken out four more loans, from lenders including Military Financial and Patriot Loans.
Such official-sounding company names — along with advertisements featuring men and women in uniform — can lull service members into believing that the loans are friendlier for the military, according to Dave Faraldo, the director the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society office in Jacksonville, Fla.
It’s a simple mistake to make.
“We know the military because we are former military,” Omni says on its website. “Most of our loan specialists are former military personnel who have been in your shoes.”
Others try to persuade military members to pitch the loans to their friends, offering a $25 referral fee or a Starbucks gift card, according to service members. Some lenders have thrown loan parties near bases, drawing people with the promise of free Buffalo wings, service members say.
The sheer availability of the loans can make it tough to abstain. Ana Hernandez, who oversees the so-called financial readiness program at Fort Bliss, says that soldiers on the base readily take out loans to buy things like electronic goods. “They are loans for wants, not for necessities at all,” she said.
Mentally Ill, and Jailed in Isolation at Rikers Island
http://nyti.ms/18mdNXd
From the annals of Rikers Island comes a document titled, “Three Adolescents With Mental Illness in Punitive Segregation in Rikers Island.” Punitive segregation means solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Schoolwork, if it comes, is passed through a slot in the cell door. Toothpaste is available once a day.
Rikers Island exists to make the rest of New York City seem blissful; there, troublemakers, troubled people and the unlucky are hidden behind a cloak of invisibility. It is a campus of jails for people arrested and awaiting trial, or others serving sentences of less than a year. Also, it is the basket into which society drops the disruptive mentally ill.
More than most jail systems, New York City has made extensive use of “punitive segregation” in recent years. Of the people put into solitary confinement, a high percentage have mental illness. On July 23, for instance, 102 of the 140 teenagers in solitary were either seriously or moderately mentally ill, according to a consultant’s report prepared for the city’s Board of Correction.
Few government agencies are subjected to candid oversight, but the city’s Correction Department is an exception. It faces a board that includes mayoral appointees but is controlled by no single politician. The board’s reports are blunt and lack the sanitized spin of most government documents.
The board’s staff prepared the report on the three mentally ill teenagers, each of whom was doing more than 200 days in solitary. Such segregation is a measure most often used to protect other detainees and prison staff when a person is dangerous or violent. But it comes at a steep cost: Even for people with no history of mental health problems, the prolonged isolation can lead to hallucinations, the consultants stated. Among those who are already ill, solitary accelerates existing psychiatric problems and makes treatment very difficult.
One of the three teenagers in the report was a detainee identified only as “Matthew,” 17, with bipolar disorder. He had been sentenced to 250 days in punitive segregation for punching a correction captain in the face. Four other members of his immediate family were also found to have bipolar disorder. The father’s only known job was drug dealer. His mother was a home health aide who worked two jobs. After two months in solitary at Rikers, Matthew had gone to two individual therapy sessions. He did not make other appointments for the following reasons, the report found: a search was underway for contraband in his area; no mental health escort to bring him to the therapy room; multiple floods; an episode involving “use of force” in the area; his refusal on one occasion to leave the cell.
An 18-year-old detainee, “Carlos,” who had depression, was also profiled in the report. He arrived in jail owing 150 days in solitary from a prior incarceration — time that remained on his account when he was released. On his return, Carlos was paying it backward.
“He and his family have had multiple encounters with the criminal justice system,” the report stated. “His earliest memory of the police goes back to his fourth birthday party, when police raided the family’s home to look for his father and drugs. Carlos said that his father did not attend his fourth birthday party because a police officer had tipped him off to the scheduled raid.”
When he was 8, his father was sent to prison, and his mother told him that he was gone “because he was a construction worker doing post-9/11 construction at ground zero.”
Between 2007 and the end of June 2013, the consultants reported, the number of punitive segregation beds increased by about 62 percent, to 998 from 614. For the last year, the board has been critical of the increase, and the city correction commissioner, Dora B. Schriro, said she was working to shift detainees into better spaces. By September, though, the board decided that rules limiting the use of solitary were essential: It voted 9 to 0 in favor of the rules. This week, the city reported that it had reduced the number of solitary cells by 17 percent in October, and was continuing the reduction into November.
As it happens, the city has drastically reduced the Police Department’s use of the stop-and-frisk tactic under pressure of a lawsuit. “What went on in Corrections looks very similar,” Dr. Bobby Cohen, a member of the board, said.
The department spokesman did not respond to messages Tuesday seeking comment. But the reductions in solitary, Commissioner Schriro said, was the fruit of long-planned strategies.
“Whatever the reason is,” Dr. Cohen said, “I’m glad they’re reducing the numbers.”
Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid
http://nyti.ms/1am67Ve
Humans have no exclusive claim on intelligence. Across the animal kingdom, all sorts of creatures have performed impressive intellectual feats. A bonobo named Kanzi uses an array of symbols to communicate with humans. Chaser the border collie knows the English words for more than 1,000 objects. Crows make sophisticated tools, elephants recognize themselves in the mirror, and dolphins have a rudimentary number sense.
And reptiles? Well, at least they have their looks.
In the plethora of research over the past few decades on the cognitive capabilities of various species, lizards, turtles and snakes have been left in the back of the class. Few scientists bothered to peer into the reptile mind, and those who did were largely unimpressed.
“Reptiles don’t really have great press,” said Gordon M. Burghardt, a comparative psychologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “Certainly in the past, people didn’t really think too much of their intelligence. They were thought of as instinct machines.” But now that is beginning to change, thanks to a growing interest in “coldblooded cognition” and recent studies revealing that reptile brains are not as primitive as we imagined. The research could not only redeem reptiles but also shed new light on cognitive evolution.
Because reptiles, birds and mammals diverged so long ago, with a common ancestor that lived 280 million years ago, the emerging data suggest that certain sophisticated mental skills may be more ancient than had been assumed — or so adaptive that they evolved multiple times.
For evidence of reptilian intelligence, one need look no further than the maze, a time-honored laboratory test. Anna Wilkinson, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lincoln in England, tested a female red-footed tortoise named Moses in the radial arm maze, which has eight spokes radiating out from a central platform. Moses’ task was to “solve” the maze as efficiently as possible: to snatch a piece of strawberry from the end of each arm without returning to one she had already visited.
“That requires quite a memory load because you have to remember where you’ve been,” Dr. Wilkinson said.
Moses managed admirably, performing significantly better than if she had been choosing arms at random. Further investigation revealed that she was not using smell to find the treats. Instead, she seemed to be using external landmarks to navigate, just as mammals do.
Things became even more interesting when Dr. Wilkinson hung a black curtain around the maze, depriving Moses of the rich environmental cues that had surrounded her. The tortoise adopted a new navigational strategy, exploring the maze systematically by entering whatever arm was directly adjacent to the one she had just left. This approach is “an enormously great” way of solving the task, Dr. Wilkinson said, and a strategy rarely seen in mammals.
Navigational skills are important, but the research also hints at something even more impressive: behavioral flexibility, or the ability to alter one’s behavior as external circumstances change. This flexibility, which allows animals to take advantage of new environments or food sources, has been well documented in birds and primates, and scientists are now beginning to believe that it exists in reptiles, too.
Anole, a tropical lizard, have a very specific method of acquiring food, striking at moving prey from above. But Manuel S. Leal, a biologist at Duke University, created a situation in which this strategy simply would not work, hiding a tasty insect larva inside a small hole and covering the hole with a tightfitting blue cap.
Two of the six lizards he tested tried to extract the treat by attacking the blue disk from above, to no avail. But the other four puzzled out new approaches. Two lizards came at the disk sideways, using their mouths to bite and lift it, while the others used their snouts as levers to pry it off the baited well.
Then Dr. Leal increased the difficulty by hiding the larvae under a new cap, this one blue and yellow. He used the solid blue disk to cover an adjacent, empty well. In tests of four lizards, two recognized the switch and learned that getting the bait now required flipping the multicolored disk instead of the blue one.
Other studies have documented similar levels of flexibility and problem solving. Dr. Burghardt, for instance, presented monitor lizards with an utterly unfamiliar apparatus, a clear plastic tube with two hinged doors and several live mice inside. The lizards rapidly figured out how to rotate the tube and open the doors to capture the prey. “It really amazed us that they all solved the problem very quickly and then did much better the second time,” Dr. Burghardt said. “That’s a sign of real learning.”
So how did we miss this for so long? Scientists say that many early studies of reptile cognition, conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, had critical design flaws.
By using experiments originally designed for mammals, researchers may have been setting reptiles up for failure. For instance, scientists commonly use “aversive stimuli,” such as loud sounds and bright lights, to shape rodent behavior. But reptiles respond to many of these stimuli by freezing, thereby not performing.
Scientists may also have been asking reptiles to perform impossible tasks. Lizards do not use their legs to manipulate objects, Dr. Leal said, “so you cannot develop an experiment where you’re expecting them to unwrap a box, for example.”
What’s more, because they are coldblooded, reptiles are particularly sensitive to environmental conditions. Rats and mice can run a maze just fine in a 70-degree lab, but many reptilian species need a much warmer environment — with air temperatures in the mid-80s or 90s. “They seem to learn the quickest at body temperatures that are very uncomfortable for us,” Dr. Burghardt said.
Now that scientists have gotten better at designing experiments for reptiles, they are uncovering all kinds of surprising abilities. Some of the most intriguing work involves social learning. The conventional wisdom is that because reptiles are largely solitary, asocial creatures, they are incapable of learning through observation.
New research calls that assumption into question. In another study of red-footed tortoises, Dr. Wilkinson deposited a tortoise on one side of a wire fence and a piece of strawberry on the other, in sight but just out of reach. To get their snouts on the treat, the tortoises needed to take a long detour around the edge of the fence.
Not one tortoise figured this out on its own. (Unable to reach the reward, some of the animals simply decided to nap.) But when they watched a trained tortoise navigate around the fence, all the observers learned to follow suit.
Other studies of reptiles have turned up similar results, challenging the popular theory that social learning evolved as a byproduct of — and a special adaptation for — group living. Instead, Dr. Wilkinson said, social learning may be merely an outgrowth of an animal’s general ability to learn.
The field of reptile cognition is in its infancy, but it already suggests that “intelligence” may be more widely distributed through the animal kingdom than had been imagined. As Dr. Burghardt put it, “People are starting to take some of the tests that were developed for the ‘smart’ animals and adapting them to use with other species, and finding that the ‘smart’ animals may not be so special.”
Voter Suppression’s New Pretext
http://nyti.ms/1ihvaw2
IRVINE, Calif. — IT’S the latest fad among state officials looking to make voting harder: We’re not racist, we’re just partisan.
Some background: In June, the Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, under which nine states and portions of others had to get federal approval before changing their election laws.
One of those states, Texas, is again in court, facing a Justice Department suit seeking to get the state under federal oversight again. To do so, the Justice Department must prove intentional racial discrimination.
Texas’ defense? It’s discrimination, all right — but it’s on the basis of party, not race, and therefore it’s O.K.
Says Texas: “It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates.”
Leaving aside that whopper — laws that dilute black and Hispanic voting power have more than an “incidental” impact — the statement, part of a court filing in August, was pretty brazen. Minority voters, in Texas and elsewhere, tend to support Democrats. So Republican officials, especially but not only in the South, want to reduce early voting; impose voter-identification requirements; restrict voter registration; and, critically, draw districts either to crowd as many minority voters into as few districts as possible, or dilute concentrations of minority voters by dispersing them into as many white-controlled districts as possible.
The Supreme Court decision unleashed all manner of new efforts to suppress minority voting — and a new batch of legal challenges.
Just this week, a federal judge in Milwaukee considered whether Wisconsin’s tough new voter-ID law violates the 1965 law by placing illegal burdens on minority voters. As in the Texas suit, the Justice Department has sued North Carolina, which in August passed the toughest set of voting rules since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the law was passed with racist intent. If successful, Texas and North Carolina could be put back under federal supervision.
Unlike with race-based discrimination, which, if proved, could violate both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, the Supreme Court has refused to recognize a standard for policing even nakedly partisan gerrymandering.
But now, supporters of strict voter-ID, registration and other voting laws are trying to use the same defense they have used to defend gerrymandering. They can claim ostensibly good reasons for their laws: preventing fraud or saving money. As a fallback, they can claim, like Texas, they are engaged in permissible partisan discrimination, not impermissible race discrimination.
But this is specious. First, it is artificial to separate race and party under current political conditions. When Don Yelton, a Republican official in North Carolina, recently told “The Daily Show” that if the state’s strict new voter-ID law “hurts a bunch of lazy blacks,” then “so be it,” it was easy to see old-fashioned Southern racism. But just as significant was Mr. Yelton’s saying that the new law “is going to kick the Democrats in the butt.”
Second, courts should alleviate unnecessary burdens on voters whatever the state’s asserted motive. The Supreme Court has said that, in redistricting, it cannot distinguish between permissible partisan considerations (for example, grouping “communities of interest”) and unconstitutional gerrymandering. But outside redistricting, partisanship has no place. Our elections should be conducted such that all eligible voters (and only eligible voters) can easily register, and cast a vote that will be accurately counted.
Few states will be as bold as Texas and admit naked partisanship. Most will engage in polite obfuscation.
Federal judges should see through these cynical pretexts. They should hold that when a state passes a law that burdens voters, it must demonstrate, with credible evidence, that the burdens are justified by a good reason and that the laws are tailored to their intended purpose. When North Carolina says it needs a strict voter-ID law to prevent fraud, courts should be skeptical, both because such laws haven’t been found to stop much impersonation fraud (there isn’t a lot) and because the same law eased absentee voting, which increases the risk of fraud.
Shifting the debate away from the “race versus party” question toward protecting voters has many virtues. The Supreme Court isn’t interested in expanding race-based remedies these days, and the Justice Department’s suits against North Carolina and Texas face an uphill battle. Yet the justices might well find a voter protection principle appealing. In 2012, lower courts started to push back against Republican overreach in voting laws. Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge in Chicago, recently expressed doubts about having upheld Indiana’s voter-ID law, which he now sees as a means of voter suppression. The pivotal swing vote on the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, also seems troubled by partisan considerations in state election law.
If courts accepted my proposal to protect all voters, the Justice Department would not have to prove some legislators are racists. It would give new life to the goals of the Voting Rights Act and would protect not only minorities, but also other populations — for example, college students, who appear to bear the brunt of voter-ID laws.
If Republican legislatures were full of Don Yeltons who mouth off to “The Daily Show,” proving a racial motivation would be easy. But they are not, and we need a new tool beyond race or party to protect everyone’s voting rights.
