Augusta National Finally Admits Women

Augusta National Protest Nets Results

For more information, call 404 525 5663 Statement of Janice L. Mathis for The Rainbow PUSH Coalition We are gratified that Augusta National has agreed to finally invite women to join the club. Darla Moore and Condoleeza Rice are both stellar examples of the character, talent, drive and accomplishment that will only enhance the club’s membership. Having come out of UGA athletics and the Olympics, we believed that Billy Payne is the type of leader who understands the role of women in sport. It is only right that during the 40th year since the enactment of Title IX that a significant barrier to women’s equality would fall. The Masters may be owned and produced by Augusta National, but it is a quintessentially American sports landmark. That fact, together with the public support provided by the citizens of Augusta-Richmond County made the tournament and its sponsor the business of all Americans. It is also important to note that part of the great American tradition is the right to protest injustice. This year, and many years before, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Martha Burke, NOW and others engaged in peaceful direct action and protest to bring this matter to light. The Rainbow PUSH Coalition celebrates this important victory with Augusta National and our movement allies. In photo below, we are picketing Augusta National once again in April, 2012. Finally, the time for change had come. Pictured are Janice L. Mathis and Sintonio Hobbs.

Augusta National Statement

For Immediate Release: Contact Sherry Mallory gme880@yahoo.com Rob Woods Spin1woods@yahoo.com (773) 256-2714 pressdepartment@rainbowpush.org Rainbow PUSH Challenges Augusta National to Include Women, Again Get Informed, Get Inspired, Get Involved ATLANTA (April 5, 2012) Nearly a decade after RPC VP Janice L. Mathis, Martha Burk and other activists protested the exclusion of women from Augusta National, some things have changed, and some have not. There are a few more female heads of Fortune 500 Companies now than there were in 2003, but Augusta National (home of the Masters) has still not opened its doors to women. Mathis and others will picket the tournament on Saturday from noon, until 2:00 p.m. “It surprises me a little that Billy Payne (given his Olympics background) has not nudged the traditionalists into accepting female members, especially in time for IBM’s CEO to receive her green sponsor’s jacket. Why bring this misery onto itself?” Georgia Power and other Atlanta-based firms ended their sponsorship of the tournament, but with tickets priced at Super Bowl levels and platinum-plated members like Bill Gates, Augusta National doesn’t need the money. “Why bother making an issue of it?” some may ask. It matters because the Masters is more than a private game of golf. It takes over the City of Augusta every Spring. School closes, the Chronicle is saturated with tournament coverage, police officers and city garbage collectors earn extra pay for overtime work, the azaleas bloom and the world comes to Augusta. It matters because after Tiger’s first win, the course was Tigerized in an effort to make it harder for him to win again. Gender and race discrimination are each made of equal parts fear and loathing. They are indistinguishable. I think of America’s image abroad. We lag the world in women leaders. Places like India and Pakistan accept female leadership easier than we do. A woman’s worth is still too often calculated based on what she looks like than what she does. If you think I exaggerate, ask Baylor’s superstar hoopster, Brittney Griner. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell our enemies everywhere that all Americans count and that we are pursuing a more perfect union and playing by one set of rules? Pretty soon the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue of affirmative action, again. Before she left the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote persuasively about the “paths to leadership” that wind through America’s most elite institutions. I encourage Augusta National to enter a new era and permit highly qualified women to join the ranks of the club’s elite membership. The Rainbow PUSH Coalition is a progressive organization protecting, defending and expanding civil rights to improve economic and educational opportunity. The organization is headquartered at 930 E. 50th St. in Chicago. To learn more about the RainbowPUSH Coalition, please visit www.rainbowpush.org, or telephone (773) 373-3366. For more information, please call (404) 525-5663 or 404 394 1500.

GOP Witchhunt for the Zombie Voter

• By Eugene Robinson, Published: April 30 The Washington Post Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests. Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters — mostly young people and minorities — and persuading them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending. The most popular means of discouraging those young and minority voters — who, coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats — is legislation requiring citizens to show government-issued photo identification before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Photo ID bills have been approved by Republican-controlled legislatures in Alabama, Kansas, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, and by referendum in Mississippi. Only one state with a Democratic-controlled legislature — Rhode Island — passed a law requiring voters to produce identification, and it does not mandate a government ID with a photo. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether to sign a voter ID bill the legislature sent to his desk. In theory, what could be wrong with demanding proof of identity? In the real world, plenty. As Republican strategists are fully aware, minorities are overrepresented among the estimated 11 percent of citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID. They are also painfully aware that, in 2008, President Obama won 95 percent of the African American vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math: If you can reduce the number of black and Latino voters, you improve the Republican candidate’s chances. If photo ID laws were going to be the solution, though, Republicans had to invent a problem. The best they could come up with was The Menace of Widespread Voter Fraud. It’s a stretch. Actually, it’s a lie. There is no Widespread Voter Fraud. All available evidence indicates that fraudulent voting of the kind that photo ID laws would presumably prevent — someone shows up at the polls and votes in someone else’s name — just doesn’t happen. For a while, the GOP pointed to South Carolina, where Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said that “dead people” had somehow cast ballots in recent elections. But then the state’s election commission investigated claims of 953 zombie voters and, um, well, never mind. The number of voters came from a crude comparison of records done by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The elections commission actually found 207 contested votes. Of that total, 106 reflected clerical errors by poll workers, 56 reflected errors by the motor vehicles department, 32 involved people who were mistakenly listed as having voted, and three involved people who had cast absentee ballots and then died before Election Day. That left 10 contested votes — count ’em, 10 — that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies. Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate’s advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID, which still hasn’t found a problem to solve — except, perhaps, an excess of Democratic voters. Even more sinister are new laws, such as in Florida, that make it much more difficult for campaigns — or anyone else — to conduct voter-registration drives. If you thought Republicans and Democrats agreed that more Americans should register to vote, you were sadly mistaken. Florida requires that groups conducting registration drives be vetted and that registration forms be submitted within 48 hours of when they are signed — an onerous and unnecessary burden that only serves to hamper anyone seeking to expand the electorate. Let’s see, who might try to do such a thing? The Democratic Party, maybe? The Obama campaign? In the name of safeguarding the sanctity of the ballot, Republicans are trying to exclude citizens they consider likely to vote for Democrats — the young, the poor, the black and brown. Those who love democracy cannot allow this foul subterfuge to succeed.

Racial Disparity in Administration of Georgia Death Penalty

April 22 marked the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp in which the Court rejected (5-4) a claim of racial bias based on a sophisticated statistical study of the death penalty in Georgia. Warren McCleskey, an African-American death row inmate convicted of killing a white police officer, presented the Court with analysis showing that defendants charged with killing white victims had odds of receiving a death sentence that were 4.3 times higher than defendants charged with killing black victims. McCleskey argued that his death sentence was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held, however, that the defendant had to show he was personally discriminated against in the course of the prosecution, and merely showing a disturbing pattern of racial disparities in Georgia over a long period of time was not sufficient to prove racial bias in his case. McCleskey also argued that when race is a factor in selecting who will die, the death penalty is unconstitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, but the Court decided the study offered was insufficient to prove that the death penalty was being applied in an arbitrary manner

As Printed in the New York Times
Georgia's Shame of a Voting Law (6 Letters)
Published: September 18, 2005
Re "Georgia's New Poll Tax" (editorial, Sept. 12):
To the Editor:
Several dozen full-time black Atlanta college students tried to buy the Georgia ID card to vote in local elections on Sept. 20. They were denied access to the ID card because they refused to surrender their home-state driver's licenses to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Is there a shred of doubt that the new Georgia poll tax is more about politics than about fraud prevention?
Janice L. Mathis
V.P., Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
Chicago, Sept. 13, 2005

Supreme Court and Judicial Activism on Health Care

Methink they doth protest too much. President called the Supreme Court Justices who are contemplating overturning Obamacare “judicial activists.” One definition of judicial activism is the usurpation of the power of the elected branches of government or appointed agencies, damaging the rule of law and democracy.
If they overturn the individual mandate, the Justices will render an opinion that will likely fly in the face of 60 years of broad interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause. It is not a coincidence that the Commerce Clause was the legal architecture used to strike down the scaffolding of private commercial segregation across the Jim Crow South during the 1950’s. There are even whispers among the extreme right about legislative amendments to the Commerce Clause, in order to narrow its reach. This is strange talk from folk who also purport to believe in unfettered capitalism. There is an inherent and growing tension between the Commerce Clause and the 10th (State’s Rights) Amendment.
It was right-wing Republicans who coined and promulgated the phrase judicial activist to denigrate judges whose judicial philosophy differs from their own. Judicial activism is in the eye of the beholder. The Fifth Circuit, which complained today about the President’s remarks, is more conservative than most of the federal circuits and sits in President Obama’s enemy territory, the deep red south.
Bravo for the President. Obamacare is the foundation of the political challenge he faces in November, whoever the candidate is. How many times have Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich indicated that Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan is so similar to Obamacare that it disqualifies him as the GOP’s nominee? The GOP and the Tea Party have taken dead aim at Obamacare as the centerpiece of their electoral strategy. The five jurists who may vote to strike down the individual mandate are all conservative Republican appointees. Are we to believe that they have no partisan leanings? That they were purged of all political thoughts on the day of confirmation? This is philosophically the same Court that decided the 2000 Presidential election, by stopping the vote count and delivering the White House to George Bush II in an opinion so partisan that the Justices themselves warned not to view it as a precedent for future decisions. Let’s not kid ourselves, the President’s political opponents
on the Supreme Court want to overturn Obamacare and the President has a right to defend it…and us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote,
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.
If the President is not “feeling” the Justices, he has every right to say so. The right wingers are protesting and seek to graft onto the Presidency a prohibition against commenting on judicial philosophy of sitting jurists. There is no such prohibition. Judges may not comment on cases before they reach the court – to avoid the appearance of partiality. But the President is a partisan and a citizen and labors under no such constraint. On the contrary, if he believes the Court means to act in a way to harm the American people, the separation of the Executive from the Judiciary means he has a duty to speak.