A lot of you have been writing great Blogs and diaries about Republican voter suppression tactics thus far for the 2018 mid-terms, a new Jim Crow that’s spread far outside the old South, targeting Latinos, native Americans, Asian-Americans and the poor as well as African-Americans. I’ve also been hearing from GOTV field operations contacts and it’s even worse than we’ve already heard on the ground. In fact the worst of the GOP voter suppression tends to be coming from a practice that hasn’t gotten so much media attention since it’s an under the radar bureaucratic move instead of a challengeable law: massive closures and hurdles with polling places, which this New Republic article does a great job of summarizing: newrepublic.com/…
We’re already familiar with Brian Kemp’s astronomical corruption in Georgia as Secy. of State, but the media has been way too focused on the “exact match” law which held up 53,000 registered voters, maybe because it was a distinct law that could (and was) challenged in courts, while missing the much greater impact from the bureaucratic shenanigans of Kemp and his fellow Jim Crow-ers, which could block the votes of hundreds of thousands of Georgia’s poor and minority voters. Kemp and his minions have been aggressively purging the rolls, but even worse, he and county elections commissions have been quietly closing hundreds of polling places throughout the state, limiting voting hours and otherwise making them impossibly inconvenient for voters who have jobs and families to take care of, or who lack effective transportation. Like the New Republic article says, mass closing of poll places for bullshit “budgetary reasons”, along with voter-roll purging that disproportionately hits the poor and minorities (as in Ohio and North Dakota’s asshole move to require street addresses for tribal members), has become Republicans’ main tool of choice in voter suppression— Florida, Arizona and Wisconsin are almost as bad as Georgia on this. But because poll closures are a bureaucratic move that gets little press attention, they’ve largely been able to get away with it. And it gets worse, since these New Jim Crow moves were made possible by the John Roberts court itself, and thus SCOTUS has largely abdicated its role as impartial watchdog to become a political tool for the GOP’s open corruption. This is even worse than most of the blatant electoral shenanigans that cause UN and international monitors to declare a country’s election results to be invalid, and the GOP is pulling this shit right in the heart of the USA.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this is creating an existential threat to American democracy, and in working extra hard to GOTV and elect Democrats in the states where this shit is going on, it’s not only essential policies are at stake, but the survival of the republic. Early on in my legal training I went to a lot of countries where mass riots, social unrest and outright civil wars broke out, and in a scary number of cases, the flash-point was a dispute about a critical election where corruption was clearly involved and the results were illegitimate. The GOP fails to realize how much they’re playing with fire here, since they’re forgetting the whole point of democratic elections— it’s a peaceful and mutually accepted way to transfer power, where even if opposing sides don’t like a particular result, they can at least accept the process. In attacking de facto voting rights, the Republican Party is now openly bringing into question the very legitimacy of the US election process at a time when we’re more polarized than at any time since the first civil war. This is flammable tinder for a second civil war by effectively creating an unsolvable Constitutional crisis, where governments sworn in at the start of 2019 (and the laws they enact) will be seen as illegitimate.
I have a lot of friends and other connections down in Florida, and even conservative Republicans there are starting to marvel at the sheer brazenness of the GOP voter suppression bullshit. It isn’t just the unconstitutional law blocking felons from voting after doing their time. (Funny how they still have to pay taxes, and in most cases, their “felonies” are bullshit drug possession crimes used to bring them into the private prison-industrial complex as slave labor.) No, Florida has been almost as aggressive as Georgia in the poll closure and rolls-purging sweepstakes, and both Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott are desperately hoping for the closures (which in other states have reduced minority turnout by 5% or more) to help their flailing, hopeless campaigns. Then there’s Texas, where Cruz is basically relying on mass poll closures in heavily Latino and African-American areas to withstand Beto’s charge. Similar in Arizona, which per capita has had an even worse level of poll closures in Latino areas— made extra poignant by the fact that Latinos in AZ have reached a level of power and influence not seen since the Mexican American War-- and where Martha McSally is in big trouble against Kyrsten Sinema due to McSally’s support of a bill to gut healthcare protections for American with preexisting conditions. And then of course, there’s North Dakota where Kevin Cramer is hoping to benefit against Heidi Heitkamp from poll closures and suppression of the tribal vote, and Tennessee, where Marsha Blackburn is desperate for mass poll closures there to stop the momentum of Phil Bredesen’s campaign.
All of these involve tight races, and if even a single one of these GOP idiots wins in the wake of what is clearly tipping the scale from blatant voter suppression, it’s going to make the results of the 2018 election fundamentally illegitimate. And since control of the Senate itself may well hinge on any one of these races, that would mean that the entire legislative calendar and judge appointments by Trump from 2019 onward, and any laws they make or rule on, would be rendered illegitimate in the eyes of a big fraction (if not a large majority) of the public. And despite all the bullshit claims of a strong economy, in the real world things are shitty, the unemployment rate is down only because millions of Americans keep leaving the labor force, “GDP growth” is just healthcare and college getting more expensive and the “new cool jobs” are just temp gigs for Starbucks. Even if the spark doesn’t come in 2019 itself, the erosion of trust in the basic fairness of US elections has already been so damaged that if it clearly results in an election of a jerk like Kemp, Scott, McSally, Cruz or Cramer, then Americans will more and more start concluding that the government and laws of America can no longer be decided by an electoral process that’s clearly rigged. The result of that is a breakdown in civil society and blood in the streets, and for all the smug “can’t happen here” idiots that always go on the news acting complacent about this, the USA doesn’t have some magic fairy dust to prevent such unrest. When corruption is this widespread, when the courts can’t be relied on as fair referees and the very legitimacy of the elections used for peaceful transfer of power breaks down, then armed conflict is the result as has been the case across the world in just the past 2 decades alone.
The Republicans really are playing with fire with their mass voter suppression and we need to be more vigilant and aggressive than ever in confronting it. The Republican Party has proven that is not an organization worthy of respect or legitimacy anymore, and there can be no compromise with then on anything, only defeating and crushing them, since they’re now now only a clear danger to basic policies and fairness but a danger to the US republic itself. So for the sake of not only our constituents and our policies, but for the sake of American democracy, GOTV like crazy and defeat every single one of those jerks in the states where this shit has been happening, because this time, the whole country really does depend on it.