A recent discussion with a teacher friend went like this:

Teacher:  Politics in Washington is broken. Maybe we do need someone like Trump to go down their and break it up so we can start all over.

Me: Well,  yeah, our federal government isn’t functioning, but not everybody is to blame. The dysfunction is the result of one party, the Republicans party, going completely off the rails.

Teacher:  What do you mean?

Me: The country elected Obama TWICE by significant margins, but Republicans have not only insulted both him and the Office of the President but also worked overtime to thwart him at every turn. Remember when Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term president? He didn’t say his goal was to get Kentucky off the federal dole, or to rebuild American infrastructure, or to make health care for our citizens more affordable, or raise living standards of working Americans. No, his goal was simply to block everything and anything the first African-American President tried to do.

Teacher:  Yeah, but I still feel we need to send Washington a message.

Me: Well, tell them it’s time to bring civility back to government.  Tell them to stop denying facts and refusing to negotiate. Our founders created a government in which compromise is absolutely essential, but the GOPers refuse to acknowledge it. They’ve thrown a wrench into the machinery of government and now are screaming that it doesn’t work any more.  And they’re all to willing to suppress voting rights to retain power.

And no, Donald Trump isn’t the answer. He’s brought political discourse down to gutter level and seems to think a President is given dictatorial powers to run roughshod over the Constitution. In short, he and his Republican colleagues have become a real threat to our democracy, not the savior of it.

“As Matt Taibbi puts it in Rolling Stone:

“… Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron. That’s really what it comes down to ….

“We’re about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades ago, shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now the audience can’t even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture is just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.”

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!