WHEN WILL THE GOP REALIZE THAT WE NO LONGER HAVE A “WHITES ONLY” DEMOCRACY

 

          …Jan. 6^th Riot was the first time a Confederate Flag was shown in D.C.   

       The CPAC Conference in Florida showed how bankrupt the GOP is today.

 

The Republican Party’s biggest problem in all the U.S. states is that too many “people-of-color” are exercising their right to vote.  But the Republican party appears to think the solution is a massive push for voter suppression that would make the old-time, Jim Crow segregationists very proud.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) circus last week in Orlando seriously showed how bankrupt the GOP is, when it comes to its ideas, its principles and its integrity.  Some might argue that the party, in buying into the lie that last year’s election was somehow stolen.  That is simply delusional.  

But I have to say, I disagree.  I think that many of the Republican leaders know exactly what they’re doing.

The GOP may have lost the White House and the Senate, but it remains strong in most state capitols.  And so far this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans in 33 states “have introduced, over 165 bills to restrict voting access.” The thrust of virtually all of these measures is to make it more difficult for African Americans and other minorities to vote.

These efforts at voter suppression are becoming more numerous, and are more discriminatory.  Especially in several of the swing states President Biden carried narrowly, including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia.  That should come as no surprise to anyone.  GOP officials who had the gaul to follow the law, and to count the November vote honestly, such as Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, have been all but excommunicated by their state Republican Party organizations.

In normally red state Georgia, not only did Donald Trump lose to Biden by 11,779 votes.  But also two incumbent GOP senators were defeated by Democratic challengers.  But the Republicans are using their control of the statehouse to try to eliminate all early voting on Sundays.  That would put an end to “Souls to the Polls,” a popular Sunday get-out-the-vote initiative in which Black churches help parishioners get to polling places to cast their ballots.

“Souls to the Polls” eliminates barriers to voting that thousands of Black Georgians otherwise might face, such as transportation for the elderly or finding time during the workweek for others.  Georgia Republicans want to put those barriers back up and to raise them even higher.

Other proposals being pushed by the Georgia GOP state legislators including getting rid of “no-excuse absentee voting”.  This was previously allowed for decades.  But by eliminating the use of convenient drop boxes for casting absentee votes, and by abolishing automatic voter registration at the Department of Driver Services offices, it’s just a number of other ways to keep these voters from voting.

All of Georgia's voter rules that allow for the black population to vote were developed by the Republican run state legislature.  Now they want to get rid of all the ways that they had developed in the first place.

Trump’s wild and false claims of election fraud aren’t the only things driving these efforts.  Republican efforts to restrict voting are hardly new in the south.  Republican officials in Georgia know about the state’s electorate at a granular level and they are capable of performing the basics of addition and subtraction.  Today, they see how the populous suburbs around Atlanta, once GOP strongholds, have been steadily trending Democratic.  They may not be able to halt that process.  But perhaps they can compensate by suppressing the African American vote in economically disadvantaged areas of Atlanta proper.  Such as in the wide “Black Belt” stretching southwest across the state, roughly from Augusta to Columbus, and in the heavily African American area around Savannah.

In the strongly Hispanic Arizona, which Biden won by 10,457 votes and where the Brennan Center tallies 19 voter-suppression bills filed since the election, the state Senate did reject a Republican measure that would have stricken roughly 200,000 names from a list of voters who automatically receive mail-in ballots.  That courtesy is considered the primary reason most Arizonans cast their votes by mail.  But the Arizona Republicans are working hard to reverse that decision for rejecting their list of voters to not receive mail-in ballots.

Another still-pending measure in Arizona  would require early ballots to be hand-delivered to a polling place rather than returned by mail.  This negates any benefits of mail-in voting.  And another proposed bill would simply disregard the will of the voters altogether.  This would occur by allowing the GOP-controlled state legislature to appoint its own slate of presidential elections. They apparently feel that Democracy, is “inconvenient.”

Elsewhere across the country, the Republican legislators are trying to tighten their voter-identification laws that are already too restrictive.  And they are also trying to find ways to disqualify more mail-in ballots.  This is for future occasions where GOP candidates need to “find” enough favorable votes, or lose enough adverse ones.  This is all for denying any victory to a Democrat.

All this amounts to an outrageous and shameful attempt to establish and perpetuate minority rule in a nation in which the Republican candidate for president has won the popular vote only once in the past eight elections.

At the state level, Democrats must fight these efforts relentlessly.  And at the federal level, they should use any means necessary.  This includes eliminating or suspending the Senate filibuster.  Also, to pass H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” which would invalidate much of the most anti-democratic legislation the GOP is trying to enact.

But the reality is that voters of color must personally resolve to not be deterred.

Whether the GOP likes it, or not, the United States is no longer a “Whites only” democracy.  The sooner the GOP realizes that, the better the chances are, that our over 200 year experiment in Democracy can continue to survive.

Copyright G. Ater 2021