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Tag: misconception

Show Me The Fraud

Show me the fraud.

Show me the hordes of college students using fake IDs to cast votes for president.

Show me the poor people boarding buses and trains or walking for miles so they can cast a vote in the wrong precinct using somebody else’s name.

Show me throngs of citizens spending entire days traveling from precinct to precinct to cast their votes over and over in the same election.

Until Republicans can produce these felons, any attempt to restrict voters’ rights by conjuring such mythical malefactors is partisanship of the ugliest and most dangerous kind.

Last week, U.S. Rep. John Lewis — a civil rights hero who earned his stake in this debate with his own blood — wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about the wave of Republican-backed voting restrictions in state legislatures. The title of his piece, “A Poll Tax by Another Name,” is enough to send chills up the spine of anyone who remembers a time when African-Americans risked their lives to vote.

Lewis took aim at the slew of photo ID mandates passed to prevent voter fraud that no one can prove exists.

“Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of actual voter impersonation at any point in its history,” he wrote. “Likewise, in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade. These theories of systematic fraud are really unfounded fears being exploited to threaten the franchise.”

In the battleground state of Ohio, where I live, the far-right extremists in the state Legislature took a breather in their march across women’s bodies to pass a slew of voting restrictions.

The voting law’s sponsor, state Rep. Robert Mecklenborg, said last March the legislation was necessary “to combat voter fraud and the perception of fraud.” No one — not county boards of elections, the League of Women Voters or former secretaries of state — could cite a single instance of voter impersonation in Ohio.

This did not deter Mecklenborg and his fellow Republicans from plowing right over the voting rights of potentially hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters.

“I believe it happens, but it’s proving a negative,” Mecklenborg told reporters after the March vote. “It’s impossible to prove a negative. How do you prove that fraud doesn’t exist there?”

The law has sparked a petition drive to repeal it through a ballot referendum.

We won’t be hearing Mecklenborg pontificate anymore about nonexistent voter fraud, because he’s no longer a member of the Ohio House of Representatives. He resigned last month after he made headlines across the country for driving while intoxicated.

Mecklenborg, who also sponsored the most radical anti-abortion legislation in the country this year, was arrested in the wee hours of the morning in Indiana, where he was driving with an expired license in a car with temporary Kentucky plates in the company of a young woman who was not his wife. He managed to hide this arrest from the public for a whole two months.

What does any of this have to do with voter fraud? Absolutely everything when you’re claiming to be the standard-bearer for authenticity.

The Republican majority in the Ohio Legislature wanted to pass a photo ID mandate, too, but one of its own — Secretary of State Jon Husted — publicly opposed it.

Husted paid a price for this independence.

GOP leadership punished him by removing a provision for online voter registration. Republicans also worked the refs at The Wall Street Journal, which ran an opinion piece about Husted, titled “Ohio’s Pro-Fraud Republican.”

Husted has more plans to buck his party’s leadership. Ohio’s new voting law eliminates the requirement for poll workers to help voters find their right precinct. Husted said he will instruct poll workers to offer help to any voter who needs it.

Imagine that. Issuing an order to defy your own party just so voters can find the right place to vote.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and an essayist for Parade magazine. To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

Why Some Workers Aren’t Covered By Social Security

Q: Hey Tom — I like your style. You’ve helped clear up so many of the false stories out there about Social Security. And I realized I might have been spreading one of them!

I’ve complained for years about members of Congress excluding themselves from Social Security and setting up cushy retirement plans like none other. But one of my friends told me I was wrong. Then we got to talking about other groups not covered by Social Security, like railroad workers. I want you to set the record straight. Can you print a list of all the groups of employees in this country who are not covered by Social Security?

A: You’ll learn in a minute why I can’t give you such a list. But I can tell you now that your friend is right: Members of Congress aren’t on it. They do pay into Social Security. Here’s the story about how Social Security coverage has changed over the years.

When Social Security was born in the 1930s, most people in this country didn’t have pension plans, and a government program like Social Security was necessary for them. So just about everyone who worked for wages was covered by Social Security from day one. (Self-employed people came under Social Security’s umbrella a decade or so later.)

But some groups of employees already had pension plans in place. The two largest were railroad workers, who were covered by the railroad retirement system, and federal government employees (including members of Congress), who were covered by the civil service retirement system. Both of those pension plans had been around long before Social Security started. So it was decided to exclude these two large groups from Social Security.

In addition, Congress felt that it would be unconstitutional to force a federal government pension plan — Social Security — on state and local governments. So employees of state and local government entities were given the option of joining Social Security. Most did. About 80 percent of all such public employees became part of Social Security.

So that’s what happened when Social Security started in the 1930s. Nobody thought twice about any of these decisions, because they made sense.

But then, over the years, people started griping about the fact that members of Congress and other high-level government officials were not covered by Social Security. Just as silly and false Web rumors about Social Security exist today, stories began to circulate in the pre-Internet world that Congress had specifically excluded itself from Social Security in order to set its members up with a nice “Cadillac retirement plan.” Eventually, simply too much political pressure came to bear on Congress for it to remain outside of Social Security.

So in 1983, as part of a package of major Social Security-reform legislation, Congress passed a law mandating that all of its members, the president and vice president, all other high-level government leaders, and all federal employees hired after 1983 would be covered by Social Security.

Today, that leaves railroad workers as the only major nationwide group of employees still not covered by Social Security.

You asked for a list of other groups not covered. But that would be almost impossible. There are thousands of them. All are various state and local employee groups around the country (again, about 20 percent of the total). Those groups could be anything from a small sewer district of maybe 10 employees to a large group of thousands of employees, such as teachers. In fact, the largest groups of non-Social Security covered workers tend to be teachers — in states like California, Texas and Ohio. Also, many law enforcement agencies in these same (and some other) states are not covered by Social Security.

Today, around the country as a whole, about 93 percent of workers are covered by Social Security.

People still gripe about members of Congress and their pensions. They do get a pension that supplements their Social Security. But that’s the way the system is supposed to work.

For example, my wife was a county librarian in a state that was covered by Social Security. She gets Social Security, and she gets a pension from the county where she worked to supplement it. My neighbor worked for a large, national corporation. He gets Social Security, and he collects a nice pension from his former employer to supplement it. But as we all know, most company pensions are getting to be a thing of the past, replaced — if they are replaced at all — by 401(k) plans. That’s not the way things were supposed to work — but it’s the way this country’s retirement systems have evolved.

And one final point: As part of any upcoming reforms to Social Security, one commonly discussed proposal is what’s called “universal coverage.” That essentially means everyone in the country would be covered by Social Security. It’s an easy political fix, because it impacts only a relatively small group of people (the 7 percent of the population not covered by Social Security). But folks who work for state and local government agencies not participating in Social Security are worried that they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into the federal pension system.

To ease their minds a bit, I would wager that any push for universal coverage will impact only newly hired employees.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 CREATORS.COM

What Our Declaration Really Said

Our nation confronts a challenge this Fourth of July that we face but rarely: We are at odds over the meaning of our history and why, to quote our Declaration of Independence, “governments are instituted.”

Only divisions this deep can explain why we are taking risks with our country’s future that we’re usually wise enough to avoid. Arguments over how much government should tax and spend are the very stuff of democracy’s give-and-take. Now, the debate is shadowed by worries that if a willful faction does not get what it wants, it might bring the nation to default.

This is, well, crazy. It makes sense only if politicians believe — or have convinced themselves — that they are fighting over matters of principle so profound that any means to defeat their opponents is defensible.

We are closer to that point than we think, and our friends in the Tea Party have offered a helpful clue by naming their movement in honor of the 1773 revolt against tea taxes on that momentous night in Boston Harbor.

Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy. It implies something fundamentally wrong with taxes themselves or, at the least, that current levels of taxation (the lowest in decades) are dangerously oppressive. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.

We need to recognize the deep flaws in this vision of our present and our past. A reading of the Declaration of Independence makes clear that our forebears were not revolting against taxes as such — and most certainly not against government as such.

In the long list of “abuses and usurpations” the Declaration documents, taxes don’t come up until the 17th item, and that item is neither a complaint about tax rates nor an objection to the idea of taxation. Our Founders remonstrated against the British crown “for imposing taxes on us without our consent.” They were concerned about “consent,” i.e. popular rule, not taxes.

The very first item on their list condemned the king because he “refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Note that the signers wanted to pass laws, not repeal them, and they began by speaking of “the public good,” not about individuals or “the private sector.” They knew that it takes public action — including effective and responsive government — to secure “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Their second grievance reinforced the first, accusing the king of having “forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance.” Again, our forebears wanted to enact laws; they were not anti-government zealots.

Abuses three through nine also referred in some way to how laws were passed or justice was administered. The document doesn’t really get to anything that looks like Big Government oppression (“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”) until grievance No. 10.

This misunderstanding of our founding document is paralleled by a misunderstanding of our Constitution. “The federal government was created by the states to be an agent for the states, not the other way around,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said recently.

No, our Constitution begins with the words “We the People” not “We the States.” The Constitution’s Preamble speaks of promoting “a more perfect Union,” “Justice,” “the common defense,” “the general Welfare” and “the Blessings of Liberty.” These were national goals.

I know states’ rights advocates revere the 10th Amendment. But when the word “states” appears in the Constitution, it typically is part of a compound word, “United States,” or refers to how the states and their people will be represented in the national government. We learned it in elementary school: The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation to create a stronger federal government, not a weak confederate government. Perry’s view was rejected in 1787 and again in 1865.

We praise our Founders annually for revolting against royal rule and for creating an exceptionally durable system of self-government. We can wreck that system if we forget our Founders’ purpose of creating a representative form of national authority robust enough to secure the public good. It is still perfectly capable of doing that. But if we pretend we are living in Boston in 1773, we will draw all the wrong conclusions and make some remarkably foolish choices.

E.J. Dionne can be reached at ejdionne(at)washpost.com

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group