Yearly Archives: 2021

(The Center Square) – Conservative groups in Wisconsin are lining up in support of a plan to allow more people to clear their past criminal records, but two conservative state senators are fighting it.

A coalition of groups that includes Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the Badger Institute, and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform say the proposal (Senate Bill 78/Assembly Bill 69) is common sense and would help more people get back to work.

“[The legislation] removes the arbitrary 25-year-old age limit,” the coalition members said in an open letter Thursday. “The bill does not expand the crimes that would be eligible for an expungement, and it retains judicial discretion – an important aspect of the current law. While these changes are modest, the impact they could have on Wisconsinites looking for a second chance is not.”

The coalition members say the idea is to help people who “committed a one-time, low-level, non-violent offense” get that second chance.

But conservative Sen. Julian Bradley, R-Franklin, said the proposal is too broad, and would expunge too many crimes.

"Crime is on a dramatic rise in Wisconsin, and I am frustrated that hiding criminal records from the public and potential employers appears to be a top priority for some in the Legislature," Bradley said. "We ought to be looking at ways to hold criminals accountable to increase public safety in our communities."

Bradley and Sen. Andre Jacque, R-DePere, were the only two to vote against the proposal at a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday.

The plan now heads to the full Senate for a vote.

(The Center Square) – One of the most prominent voices for police reform in Wisconsin over the past year is now denouncing the police reform legislation making its way through the Wisconsin Capitol.

State Rep. David Bowen, D-Milwaukee, on Thursday said the proposals from the Speaker’s Task Force on Racial Disparities create ‘guardrails around reform.’

“While most of the bills presented today are not offensive on their face and some would work to codify certain good practices that are already happening in many jurisdictions, they very clearly do not go far enough, and do not rise to the moment or advance the kind of justice reforms that have been demanded of us,” Bowen said.

He is not alone. Activists from Milwaukee and Madison said pretty much the same thing Thursday.

“Most of those demands are not on the table, not being spoken about and not being taken seriously,” activist Vaun Mayes said after the reforms cleared an Assembly committee Thursday. “That is a problem.”

Mayes wants a statewide ban on chokeholds, and wants lawmakers to order police officers out of schools.

Bowen said the reform proposals on both issues “don’t really do anything.”

Rep. Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, who led the Task Force, says the reforms on the table are not perfect, but he said they are a start.

Bowen wants lawmakers to start over.

“I sincerely hope that the Committee takes its time with these bills and allows myself and others to work on amendment language that would not only enhance bipartisan consensus around these reforms, but also incorporate the concerns and desires of grassroots community members,” Bowen added.

Wisconsin lawmakers are focused on criminal justice reform this spring. The legislation from the Speaker’s Task Force is just part of the effort to update the rules for police officers. The Wisconsin Senate is moving ahead with its own set of proposals. In all, Republicans say they could have 15 police reform plans for the governor to sign by the end of June.

(The Center Square) – While the origins of COVID-19 have been a political hot button issue rife with controversy, new evidence has prompted a different question: did American taxpayers help fund the controversial Wuhan lab?

A group of 209 House Republicans sent a letter Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., demanding she allow an investigation into whether the Wuhan lab released COVID-19. The same day, Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees announced an investigation into the National Institutes of Health’s grant funding for the scandal-ridden Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“There is mounting evidence the COVID-19 pandemic started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese Communist Party covered it up," the Republican lawmakers wrote in a letter to NIH. "If U.S. taxpayer money was used to develop COVID-19, conduct gain of function research, or assist in any sort of cover-up, EcoHealth Alliance must be held accountable. It is incumbent upon grant recipients to ensure their work is performed within the scope of the grant, advances our national interest, and protects our national security. It is vital to understand if U.S. taxpayer funds were at all affiliated with a pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly 600,000 Americans so we can prevent similar future catastrophes.”

House Committee on Oversight and Reform ranking member James Comer, R-Ky., and House Committee on the Judiciary ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sent a letter to Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The Republicans point to a grant from NIH given to EcoHealth, which they say has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology "to study bat coronaviruses."

“EcoHealth has awarded almost $600,000 to the WIV and another $200,000 to the Wuhan University School of Public Health," the letter reads. "On July 8, 2020, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Dr. Michael Lauer sent a letter to EcoHealth expressing concern over its relationship with the WIV and suspended EcoHealth’s grant pending answers to several routine questions. The questions posed by Dr. Lauer raise serious concerns and suggest COVID-19 was spreading worldwide by October 2019.

“Despite U.S. intelligence concerns about the ability of the WIV to properly contain the deadly disease including the virus that causes COVID-19 they study, EcoHealth still awarded U.S. taxpayer grant funds to the WIV,” the letter adds.

Suspicions that COVID originated in the Wuhan lab were widely dismissed last year, but the theory recently gained new credence after the Wall Street Journal reported that three doctors working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 for COVID-like symptoms.

“Dems haven't held a hearing on it,” said Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., after the letter was released. “Big Tech censored posts about it. The media attacked people who talked about it. China can't get away with this. Americans deserve answers.”

Though Republicans have been critical of Democrats, some Democrats have backed an inquiry into Wuhan in light of the most recent evidence. President Joe Biden said this week he has asked U.S. intelligence agencies to probe COVID's origins with an eye toward China.

The movement among Republicans to investigate the lab has steadily increased to the crescendo Friday. What has rankled lawmakers most, though, is evidence that Americans helped fund the very lab at the center of this controversy.

"The cause of this pandemic is the most important question facing the world," said Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., who sent a letter to Fauci. "It's clear that we cannot ignore COVID-19's potential lab origins, and it's past time for Dr. Fauci to provide answers not only on the role of US funding for Chinese labs, but also his support for this reckless research.”

In the months leading up to November’s election, voting officials in major cities and counties worked with a progressive group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and its allies to create ballots, strategically target voters and develop “cure” letters in situations where mail-in ballots were in danger of being tossed out.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life, or CTCL, provided millions of dollars in private funding for the elections that came from a $350 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The CTCL gave “COVID-19 response” grants of varying amounts to 2,500 municipalities in 49 states.

In exchange for the money, elections divisions agreed to conduct their elections according to conditions set out by the CTCL, which is led by former members of the New Organizing Institute, a training center for progressive groups and Democratic campaigns.

A CTCL partner, the Center for Civic Design, helped design absentee ballot forms and instructions, crafted voter registration letters for felons and tested automatic voter registration systems in several states, working alongside progressive activist groups in Michigan and directly with elections offices in Georgia and Utah.

Still other groups with a progressive leaning, including the Main Street Alliance, The Elections Group and the National Vote at Home Institute, provided support for some elections offices.

Facebook, with the CTCL, was also part of the effort, providing a guide and webinar for election officials on how to engage voters. Included were directions to report “voter interference” to Facebook authorities. The company also provided designated employees in six regions of the U.S. to handle questions. Together, the groups strategically targeted voters and waged a voter assistance campaign aimed at low-income and minority residents who typically shun election participation, helping Democratic candidates win key spots all over the U.S.

The little-explored roles of CTCL and other such groups emerged in emails and other records obtained by RealClearInvestigations and public documents secured by conservative litigants and groups, including the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has filed more than 800 public records requests with elections offices accepting the grants.

Previously, the Zuckerberg-funded effort has been described in generally positive terms, notably when NPR reported in December on "How Private Money From Facebook's CEO Saved The 2020 Election" – in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump's doubts about the legitimacy of the process and "Congress' neglect."

Conservatives take a more critical view the effort. “This private funding has never been done before,” said Hayden Dublois, a researcher at the Foundation of Government Accountability. ”We hear about dark money and corporations buying ads, but never have we seen hundreds of millions of private dollars going into the conducting of elections. And states didn’t have any laws on the books to stop it.”

Numerous Trump supporters contend that the 2020 presidential election was rigged or even stolen but have produced little concrete evidence to prove it. But their suspicions aren’t likely to be dispelled by the efforts of the private progressive groups, however legal.

They are among other notable instances of monied interests underwriting public governance and affairs for political ends. In 2018, RCI reported that a New York University School of Law program funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg had placed environmentally minded lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general to challenge Trump administration policies. And examples of private efforts to steer cash-strapped public education are numerous, from the Koch charities on the right to more recent race-conscious programs on the left emphasizing the legacy and centrality of white racism in society.

Zuckerberg did not respond to an emailed request from RCI for comment. In a post-election interview, he praised Facebook’s security work during the election and singled out its policing of “misinformation.” He noted working with polling officials to watch for information that might lead to “voter suppression” and said Facebook had strengthened its enforcement “against militias and conspiracy networks like Q-Anon.”

Facebook has banned Trump from its platform and has delisted individuals – many of them conservatives – for espousing views about the election that it insists are “misinformation.”

According to court documents filed by the Thomas More Society, a conservative law firm, the Zuckerberg-funded CTCL allowed elections departments to use grant money to buy vehicles to transport “voter navigators.” The group filed unsuccessful lawsuits in several states before the election, contending the private funding created unconstitutional public-private partnerships. Several other suits remain active.

The election department in Green Bay, Wis., promised as part of its CTCL grant of $1 million that it would employ the vote navigators to “assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions … and witnessing absentee ballot signatures,” according to documents filed in legal complaints in Wisconsin by Erick Kaardal, a Minneapolis-based lawyer who has worked on the Thomas More Society lawsuits.

Caleb Jeffreys, one of at least two voter navigators in Green Bay, described his duties as including “curing absentee ballots.” Jeffreys, now a city employee in Green Bay according to his LinkedIn profile, did not respond to an interview request.

Tiana Epps-Johnson, founder of CTCL; Whitney May, director of government services for CTCL; and Hillary Hall, senior adviser to state and local election officials for the National Vote at Home Institute, did not respond to interview requests.

Navigators in Green Bay were also part of voter registration efforts, emails show. They worked closely with a local nonprofit group, which requested that public employees work voter registration events. At least two city employees attended with equipment to conduct voter registration and help people apply for an absentee ballot.

Agents from CTCL trained poll workers in Georgia and paid for other individuals to count and tabulate ballots in Wisconsin, which was won by President Trump in 2016 and President Biden won in November by 20,000 votes.

Emails show that Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a fellow with the National Vote at Home Institute, directed Green Bay city employees in gathering and counting absentee ballots on Election Day, and that he was granted access by the city to secured areas and served as an on-site contact for the department on election night.

Rubenstein, who did not respond to a call seeking an interview, also provided help in “curing” ballots that were turned in without the appropriate information, including a signature or address.

Dozens of states require voting clerks to inform voters if their ballot has been filled out incorrectly, giving the voter a chance to fix the ballot and have it accepted. In Wisconsin, that practice is encouraged but not mandatory, under the reasoning that it can drain manpower from other tasks.

But with the grant money provided by CTCL, additional manpower made the time-consuming task feasible, freeing up money for more voter recruitment and outreach.

In Lansing, Mich., the elections department used its $443,000 grant to buy more absentee ballot drop boxes and mail absentee ballot applications to every registered voter.

In Georgia, the grants were used to expand curbside voting and conduct “the necessary voter outreach … to promote absentee voting and encourage higher percentages of our electors to vote absentee,” according to a grant application.

Documents inspected by RealClearInvestigations also showed:

In Lowndes County, Ga., CTCL grant money was used to pay $15,000 in attorney fees through June. A county elections official told RCI that the money was paid to lawyers handling public records requests stemming from the elections, a process that she expects will last into the summer.CTCL was “very lenient regarding what we could spend the money on,” Deb Cox, Lowndes County elections supervisor, said. “They put virtually no restrictions on it as long as it relates to the election.”Mahoning County, Ohio, spent $3,500 on a student to monitor Twitter and Facebook and “report any bad actors that may want to disrupt our operations,” one local official stated in its grant report. Grant money was also spent to produce a training video for elections workers.Election officials in Lorain County, Ohio, paid an $8,100 Verizon bill and spent $24,000 on a van at a local car dealership. The van was used to transport equipment between a warehouse and the elections department, an elections official told RCI.In Boone County, Mo., the elections department used $3,000 of the COVID grant to make a rap video and buy radio spots. “We did a rap video to appeal to younger, first-time voters,” Brianna Lennon, Boone County clerk, said. “We wanted to keep it popular in a format that would have the most appeal to young voters. “

Elections departments received millions of extra dollars in federal aid in 2020, including $400 million in CARES Act funding and $425 million in federal Help America Vote Act grants.

Despite the influx of public money, elections departments across the U.S. were hamstrung because of the pandemic, said Ben Hovland, a Trump appointee to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which administers grants to the states.

Hovland praised the CTCL for providing the money to run elections.

“This was a very unique set of circumstances, and what you heard from election officials was that this [private] money was going for the basics of trying to help people vote, keeping people safe, postage – really the basics,” Hovland said.

He was unaware of the spending on rap videos, trucks, lawyers, vote navigators and phone bills with the private money.

“That runs contradictory to what I’ve heard from most election officials,” he said. “But every jurisdiction runs their election different, and each has its own way to spend money, so I can’t speak to any of that. It wasn’t federal funds. It wasn’t taxpayer money.”

As to the need for the money, not all jurisdictions that received a CTCL grant used it. The elections office in Miami-Dade County, Fla., received $2.4 million from CTCL, but did not spend it immediately, instead receiving a six-month extension to use the money. Several other municipalities did not spend the entirety of their grants and have received extensions.

Boosting Democratic Turnout

Vote margins in many of the areas receiving CTCL funding showed increased Democratic voter turnout, part of a strategy to boost the margins enough in Democrat-friendly areas to overcome Republican margins.

President Trump took the reliably Republican state of Missouri in 2020, but President Biden increased the Democratic presidential vote and won Boone County by 7,000 votes. Hillary Clinton had a 5,000-vote margin in 2016.

In Webb County, Texas, which received $2.8 million from CTCL, voter registrations increased by 10,000 over 2016. The new recruits in the South Texas county voted for President Biden by a two to one margin.

In Fairfax County, Va., which received $1.4 million in CTCL funding, Democrats increased voter turnout by 65,458 compared with a 10,564 increase by Republicans in 2020 versus 2016. The state, which trends Democratic, went to Biden.

While seven states have passed legislation this year prohibiting or limiting elections departments from accepting private funding, far more allow it and “it will certainly continue,” said Kaardal, the Minneapolis-based lawyer.

Kaardal contends the plan by these operatives, working in league with some election officials, was to increase the absentee ballot turnout among demographic groups that favored their candidates and to offset the margins by Republicans, typically in areas outside cities.

“It was a pay-to-play scheme, where in exchange for taking this money, the CTCL gets to tell them how to run the election,” he said. “And it will happen again in 2022.”

In Texas, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant III, an Obama appointee, ruled in favor of the private funding with a stance that was typical among the judiciary in various federal districts and states.

“Ultimately, plaintiffs complain that people with different political views will lawfully exercise their fundamental right to vote,” Mazzant ruled. “That is not a harm. That is democracy.”

It’s a democracy embraced by elections officials across the U.S. who called the 2020 elections the most secure ever.

Paul Adams, elections supervisor in Ohio’s Lorain County, is eager to accept more private grant money after his department received $435,000 for the fall election.

“If anything like this came along in the future, I would certainly apply,” Adams said. He’s convinced the CTCL is a nonpartisan group trying to make voting safe and easy, and can’t understand why some states are trying to halt private money in public elections.

“I don’t think it’s the grants these people are mad about,” Adams said. “It’s more a matter of where they came from.”

(The Center Square) – The Texas Public Policy Foundation and America First Policy Institute have sued the U.S. Small Business Administration, alleging a provision in the America Rescue Act requires the SBA to prioritize businesses owned by women and minorities to receive nearly $30 billion in COVID-19-designated relief money above other applicants.

Greer’s Ranch Café vs Guzman was filed against the SBA and its acting director, Isabella Casillas Guzman, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. It is the first lawsuit filed by the TPPF and AFPI against the Biden administration.

The ARPA, which passed along party lines and was signed into law by President Joe Biden, appropriated $28.6 billion to a Restaurant Revitalization Fund to be dolled out to applicants. Section 5003 of the bill requires the SBA to prioritize applicants who are women, veterans, and socially and economically disadvantaged business owners.

The SBA defines socially disadvantaged individuals as those “who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society because of their identities as members of groups and without regard to their individual qualities. The social disadvantage must stem from circumstances beyond their control.”

Economically disadvantaged individuals are defined as those whose “ability to compete in the free enterprise system has been impaired due to diminished capital and credit opportunities as compared to others in the same or similar line of business who are not socially disadvantaged.”

The lawsuit asks the court to determine whether the government has the right to deny Americans access to federal assistance based on their ethnicity and gender. The groups argue the government’s policy “is wantonly illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral.”

“These race and sex preferences are patently unconstitutional, and the Court should promptly enjoin their enforcement,” the complaint states. “Doing so will promote equal rights under the law for all American citizens and promote efforts to stop racial discrimination, because ‘[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’”

TPPF’s Chief Counsel Robert Henneke said, “For over 125 years, the United States Supreme Court has recognized that the Constitution forbids discrimination by the government against any citizen because of his race. This lawsuit will enforce that guarantee.”

The lawsuit calls on the court to block the enforcement of any policy that would discriminate against certain classes of people in order to “promote equal rights under the law for all American citizens and promote efforts to stop racial discrimination.”

As of May 12, the RRF has received more than 147,000 applications from women, veterans, and socially and economically disadvantaged business owners, requesting a total of $29 billion in relief funds, representing nearly half of the applicants.

Guzman argues the SBA “is helping thousands of restaurants and other food and beverage businesses across the country get the help they desperately need to recover and rebuild from this pandemic. The numbers show that we’ve been particularly successful at reaching the smallest restaurants and underserved communities that have struggled to access relief. These businesses are the pillars of our nation’s neighborhoods and communities. We are making progress, but we have much more work to do as we continue reaching our underserved entrepreneurs.”

Overall, the SBA received more than 266,000 applications representing over $65 billion in requested funds. During the first week of the program, it received applications from 76,183 women business owners, 6,093 veteran business owners and 42,284 economically and socially disadvantaged individuals.

A total of $2.7 billion of relief funds have already been distributed to 21,000 restaurants since the fund opened May 3, 2021, the SBA reports.