White Racist Republicans Plot to Sacrifice Minority Voters on the Altar of the Big Lie

By DICK POLMAN

It was way back in 2012 when I first realized that the GOP’s voter-suppression mission was a crock of dung.

Pennsylvania Republicans had concocted a new state law that required all voters to have photo IDs. The GOPers claimed they did so to fight a purported epidemic of voter fraud. They were swiftly sued in state court by voting rights activists who knew that the law’s true purpose was to create bureaucratic hurdles for voters (disproportionately non-white and lower-income) who lacked government-issued photos. Ready for the fun part? On the eve of trial, Republican lawyers admitted in a sworn document that they’d found “no investigations and prosecutions” of voter fraud in Pennsylvania; indeed, they were “not aware of any incidents,” and they would “not offer any evidence.”

Or as Homer Simpson would say, “D’oh!” The law went into permanent limbo.

I’m referencing this ancient history to show you that even though Republicans’ vote-suppression instincts are currently in overdrive – in 43 states, with at least 250 proposed laws to crack down on people of color in the name of “election integrity” – they’re not doing anything new. Their attempts to maximize the voting clout of their shrinking white base in an increasingly diverse nation have merely become more urgent in the wake of Joe Biden’s victory. Indeed, his victory in Georgia – a Deep South state where the white people’s party has long sought to rig the electorate – has especially panicked Republicans and underscored their determination to lash themselves to the mast of a failed one-term, twice-impeached loser who’s currently under criminal investigation.

In other words, the termites are busier than ever gnawing away at our rickety democratic foundations.

More than ever, they’re invested in the Big Lie that somehow the election was “stolen” from them. What they’re really saying is that when white people beholden to the GOP cast ballots, an election is legit. But when minorities – particular African-Americans, particularly in the cities – cast ballots, it’s inherently crooked.

Witness, for instance, Trump’s recent baseless complaints about “Detroit” and “Philadelphia,” intimating via dog whistle that such places are the equivalent of darkest Africa. Witness, for instance, the coded white supremacy message from Republican John Kavanaugh, an Arizona lawmaker and vote-suppression enthusiast, who said the other day that “everybody shouldn’t be voting … Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes as well.” Witness, for instance, a remark uttered by Dan Yelton, a North Carolina GOP official, way back in 2013, referring to that state’s new photo ID law: “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, then so be it.”

As we well know, the MAGA-cult GOP is impervious to factual reality. It matters not that deposed Attorney General Bill Barr said last fall that “there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud.” It matters not that the Trump regime’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded, “There’s no evidence that any (2020) voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised” during an election that was “the most secure in American history.” Nothing in the empirical realm can shake Republican fealty to the Big Lie, or slow the party’s determination to sacrifice minority voters on its phony altar.

What all this means is that, even in our heady moment of triumph, with vaccines on a roll and COVID relief on the way, Democrats and progressives cannot rest on their laurels for even a millisecond. Yes, the Republicans may be morally and philosophically bankrupt – they have shelved their party’s traditional precepts and replaced them with nothing – but what they do understand, what indeed is now their sole organizing principle, is the hunting and gathering of brute power. They have no interest in expanding their appeal (they’ve lost the presidential popular vote in seven of the last eight elections); all they have left is a feral instinct to suppress the votes of those who oppose them.

Their violent Jan. 6 insurrection against democracy didn’t work. So the strategy now is to kill it state by state by state – slashing or killing Sunday voting, early voting, mail voting – basically putting their thumbs on the demographic scale. Or, as Stacey Abrams calls it, “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

So what should be done about this? Amanda Carpenter, a former top aide to two Republican senators, and a blessedly sane voice, says it’s imperative that Senate Democrats join their House colleagues in passing the current federal voting rights bill that would squash the GOP’s state-level suppression mission. And the only way to thwart the GOP’s racist extremism is for the Senate to pass the bill by abolishing the filibuster’s artificial 60-vote threshold.

True that. Carpenter asks rhetorically, “So how is it, exactly, that Democrats are supposed to have a reasonable, good-faith negotiation concerning voting rights with a party that worked aggressively to overturn Biden’s free and fair victory? … There’s no room for compromise. There’s nothing to discuss … It’s tough to make a good case as to why Democrats should let the authoritarians in the GOP filibuster democracy itself.”

Either Biden and the Democrats will take all necessary steps to protect all voters and the foundations of democracy, or the termites will win.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2021

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