Attacks on voting rights that threaten our very democracy
Republican senators filed out of Mitch McConnell’s office today and promptly announced they will not hold hearings on any Obama nominee for the Supreme Court. Remember this when you go to the polls: These are the people who, by their very actions, want to turn America back to the era of Jim Crow, making our country, in the words of Jeffrey Toobin, “a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy.”
Why do they hate America(ns)?
“Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama’s climate-change regulations. Scalia’s reputation, like the Supreme Court’s, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was “Get over it.””
–– Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
But of course, his acolyte’s are carrying on this shameful legacy:
As Daily Kos puts it: “It should be a source of amazement and disgust to every American when efforts are made to suppress other Americans’ access to the ballot. People lost their lives in the long struggle to extend the vote to everyone beyond property-owning white men. Nonetheless, some high muckety-mucks still have no qualms about making it difficult for certain people to vote, those certain people being the poor, people of color, youth—young women especially, and elders.”
South Carolina: As Kira Lerner at Think Progress reports, while South Carolina’s voter ID law is not as tough as most other states, voters still will be asked to show an approved photo ID. Now, if they don’t have one, they can still cast a ballot if they sign an affidavit explaining why there was a “reasonable impediment” to their obtaining said photo ID. The problem is state officials, including Gov. Nikki Haley, are not telling voters about this provision of the law. Remember, before the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, South Carolina was one of the states required to get any changes in its voting laws cleared in advance by the U.S. Department of Justice. [Refer to Scalia above]
West Virginia: Last week West Virginia House of Delegates joined the Voter Suppression Club as the Republican-dominated body passed a new voter ID law by a vote of 64 to 34. “This bill is taking a a very ugly page out of the ALEC playbook,” said Del. Mike Pushkin (D-Kanawha), referring to the free-market lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). “Groups like ALEC and the Koch brothers run bills like this, in my opinion, to suppress minority votes in many states,” Pushkin said.
Alabama: This state will be able to uphold its dreadful legacy thanks to a ruling by a federal judge that keeps the state’s disputed voter ID law intact at least for the primary.
Kansas: Of course, as expected Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach is being sued over the proof of citizenship requirement to register to vote in Kansas. As 30,000 people have been kept off the rolls by the law. Plaintiffs also want to stop the trashing of 35,000 incomplete voter registration applications that were suspended because the applicant did not return with proof of citizenship.
Another day defending the right to vote in the world’s oldest Constitutional democracy!
Kris Kobach, the extremely conservative Republican Kansas secretary of state with a long history of pushing an extremely conservative, i.e., suppressive, agenda on voting rights and immigration, is back in the news again. This time he’s working with a buddy on the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) to require voters to prove they are U.S. citizens. In fact, it was done without input from any other members of the commission, which had rejected similar moves by Kobach in the past. This in spite of the fact that the Supreme Court dealt Kobach a major setback last June when it refused to take up a lower court’s ruling that states could not force the feds to require proof of citizenship on the federal voting registration form.
Republicans may not be happy with Trump as their candidate this year, but they’ll do everything in their power to help him win. With guys like Kobach in charge, we are indeed a nation at risk.
Paul Krugman’s review of ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon offers an important lesson, but not the one Krugman draws from it. Says Krugman: “Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event.” And further “Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of “headwinds”: rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.”
I beg to differ.
The lesson we should draw is that without transformative political leaders like Washington, Lincoln, FDR (right), and quite possibly Obama (Obamacare?), we have become a Nation at Risk, squandering our birthright. After the growth surge from 1920 to 1970, bad political decisions — not the least of which are Vietnam and Iraq, coupled with a lack of investment at home in infrastructure and basic science, along with financial policies that turned investing into gambling and skewed incomes to the top 0.1% — have left us floundering … and possibly foundering. Today the problem isn’t the White House. Rather, it’s congressional intransigence and denial.
We have to get our game back. And we can. If we organize to overcome GOP voter suppression laws and GOTV to elect a progressive President and Congress. (See Why Can’t I Vote? on this web site.)
Elections do have consequences — from the select board to the State House, to the White House.