linnposts.com

“This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”

President Lyndon Johnson spoke these words on August 6, 1965 when he signed the Voting Rights Act.

It broke the back of white southerners using dirty tricks and outright intimidation to prevent black citizens in their states from registering to vote.

The Act passed the Senate with bi-partisan support (47 Democrats and 30 Republicans). It passed the House in a similar fashion, with 221 Democrats and 112 Republicans.

There were 16 Democrats in the Senate and 112 in the House who voted against the bill, all of them white southerners.  

Today we are seeing a classic political role reversal with Republicans rather than southern Democrats leading efforts to undo the right to vote President Johnson described as “the basic right without which all others are meaningless.” Since January they have proposed 253 bills in 43 states whose purpose is to make voting more difficult for minorities.

This week Georgia Republicans are voting on restrictions that include limiting weekend voting, shortening voting hours on election day, and (if you can believe it) a provision that would make it illegal to serve food or drinks to voters waiting in long lines outside polling places.

Some Republicans say they don’t support that last provision, but they’re okay with everything else.

All of this, all of it, is taking place because a conservative majority of the Supreme Court struck down Section 4b of the original Voting Rights Act in 2013, the provision requiring states with a history of voter discrimination to get “pre-clearance” from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

In his infinite wisdom, Chief Justice John Roberts said times had changed and those states had changed with them. How wrong he was. Within a few months of the ruling, multiple states with Republican-controlled legislatures started introducing voter suppression laws and have not stopped. 

A few Republicans still believe every American has the right to vote and that winning fair and square still matters, but not enough to stop what is happening. Wisconsin Republican Jim Sesenbrenner tried to pass a revised Voting Rights Act when his party controlled the House, but he never got enough Republicans to support it. He retired in January of this year. 

In 2019 a Democratically-controlled House passed the updated Voting Rights Act Sesenbrenner worked on, but Republicans controlled the Senate at the time and Mitch McConnell refused to bring it up.

It is hardly surprising to hear Republicans say they will filibuster that bill now named after John Lewis and also the For the People election reform act.

While racism was the chief reason southern Democrats stood in the way of minority voting, Republicans have added another one – Cheating.

Racism is still involved, but cheating is the existential reason for their actions. Read the laws being proposed and the extent of their cheating will astonish you. Not one of them is needed. Not one. 

But Republicans know how to read the times and what they see is that their policies have been appealing to fewer and fewer voters, and with Trump’s takeover they see little chance of winning fair and square, given the increasingly racially diverse middle-class voting public.

Their cover is the claim of election fraud, but the evidence against it has become so strong that they are the only ones who believe it anymore.

The answer to their problem is to cheat. 

The lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party said as much last week when Justice Amy Comey Barrett asked him what his party’s interest was if the court nullified the state’s voter restriction law: “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game…It’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election.”

The irony of the Big Lie that Joe Biden won election by cheating is that this is exactly what Republicans are trying to make legal – cheating to win with laws that put obstacles in the way of minority voters who vote for Democrats.

Cheating and underlying racism is the modern Republican Party. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone when Trump challenged the vote in predominantly black districts in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia.

What I cannot figure out, though, is why Republican voters who believe in racial equality and in free and fair elections continue to support this stuff. How does any rational person believe that cheating people out of their vote is good for democracy? 

Last Sunday (March 7) marked the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday when white racists in Selma, Alabama led by the police attacked and brutalized peaceful civil rights protestors, including the late Congressman John Lewis, as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right to vote.

Every white American should remember that people who looked like us were the ones who did that, and then ask ourselves if supporting voter suppression efforts being taken up now means we not only look like them, but are now acting just like them.