Fine words butter no parsnips
Biden gave a speech about voting rights, which is nice and all but it’s not going to do anything.
Some Democrats hope that presidential attention will persuade Congress to pass a voting-rights bill that outlaws the new Republican voting rules. But that’s unlikely. Congressional Republicans are almost uniformly opposed to ambitious voting-rights bills. And some Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin, seem unwilling to change the filibuster, which would almost certainly be necessary to pass a bill.
Well. Let’s get real. Congressional Republicans are almost uniformly opposed to any voting-rights bills at all, except the kind that restrict them. The more people who vote, the fewer Republicans who get elected. They don’t gerrymander for the fun of it you know.
In 17 states, Republican lawmakers have recently enacted laws limiting ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Texas could become the 18th.
Republican officials have justified these new laws by saying that they want to crack down on voter fraud. They passed the laws after Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
Studies have repeatedly found that voter fraud is not a widespread problem. Some of the very few cases have involved Republicans trying to vote more than once.
The substance of the laws makes their true intent clear: They are generally meant to help Republicans win more elections.
And we’re just going to stand around and watch it happen.
Historians tell us that the Western Roman Empire ended in the year 476.
Yet there was a Roman Senate for several more centuries.
Perhaps the United States ended in 2016 (or even earlier), and right now we’re just sorta looking at the formal institutions pretending to function.
I think others may have mentioned it before, but what’s more worrying than voting restrictions (some of which are probably more likely to hurt Trump’s coalition) is the bills helping them reject election results they don’t like.
The US Founding Fathers wrote a constitution that had to survive the tests of the Civil War, Reconstruction, two world wars, the Cold War and Donald Trump. The latter remains as a work-in-progress. Results yet to be announced.
GW: The Roman Legions also survived for quite a while. The war machine remained well-funded, even if it was not very effective. That sounds familiar as we slink out of Afghanistan this month.
Blood Knight: All part of our devolution into a tin hat failed state ruled by caudillos able to best cater to the ignorance and prejudices of the (restricted) voters.
This is certainly the animating force behind Republican ideas on voter suppression, but it’s…not actually true? I mean the hypothesis that more votes = fewer Republicans elected. Trump’s election had the highest turnout in history (and not just because of population growth), and not only did Trump squeak it out in the Electoral College, he brought a whole wave of Republicans with him. In the 2020 election, Trump and Republicans did much better among minorities than they ever had before, with very high turnout. They happened to lose more white people than they gained nonwhite people, and consequently lost, but even in losing they have disproved “suppressing minority votes means we win, letting minorities vote means we lose”.
That doesn’t mean they’re going to *realise* that any time soon, though.
Seth: #5: In Georgia the margin of victory for Biden was the result of very serious ground game efforts to help black voters get their ballots in, and the tools that the GOTV effort used are very much the tools being suppressed in the Texas efforts to suppress the votes. Texas, Arizona and New Mexico have undergone some serious demographic shifts to become more likely to vote for Democrats and this has been in process for a few decades. In Texas the Republicans have maintained power by restricting the vote in locations that tend to have more black and hispanic voters, There are fewer polling places in Houston than the population should cover. In Arizona, and especially in Maricopa County, elections officials changed many of the policies that made it difficult for poorer people in certain parts of the county to vote. Not only did they add more polling places, they changed the rule to allow voters to vote in any precinct, rather than have to rush home to their local precinct to vote. This helped those who work in a very large geographic county.
So, even if a larger number of hispanics voted for Trump as Catholics against abortion, the association with Joe Arpaio hurt Trump even more. Voter turnout among minority voters will help Democrats more than it will help Republicans.