WHY SENATOR LINDSAY GRAHAM SHOULD NOT BE A U.S. SENATOR

 

…The South Carolina U.S. Senator, Lindsay Graham, as most Democrats see him

 

It is true that, ”everyone has the “right to vote”, but the Republicans don't agree

 

I have never been a fan of the Senator from South Carolina, Lindsay Graham, especially since he was a great, out-spoken, anti-Trump Republican, and later became a major supporter of President Trump and one of his favorite golfing partners. But, for the Senator to admit a GOP policy “doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” you know something has to not be right.  However, that was his verdict on the Trump support network of “Fox News Sunday”.  It was all about the Georgia Republicans’ decision to criminalize giving food or water to people standing in line to vote.

It was the senator’s colleague, Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), that was appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” who dodged, rather than condemned the move by saying: “I don’t know the details”.  This was a bogus statement because it was made after many days of this new law making headlines across the country.

In the real world, a provision like that would normally make most legislators rethink their support for the whole bill, which further restricts Georgians’ voting rights.  But not in today’s GOP.

“In Georgia, you had an explosion of mail-in balloting,” Graham argued in defending the law’s new limits on absentee and mail-in ballots. “The Carter-Baker Commission in 2005 looked at our election system and they had two warnings for us. Absentee mail voting is ripe for fraud, and ballot harvesting, where an individual can collect ballots on behalf of other people.  This is a threat to democracy as we know it.

One must note that Graham had to go back to a 2005 commission report rather than cite specific instances of widespread fraud.  And that is because, the fraud does not exist.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senator Patrick Toomey (R-Pa.) was even more forthright: “You look at the Georgia law, there’s no voter suppression. … All you need [to vote absentee] is provide some, some verification of ID, and so does every department of transportation in America in order to drive.”

Now, one might say, that is just common sense.  But this brings up two problems: First, we all have the right to vote, while no one has the right to drive.  So, since that is the case, it should be easier for all of us to vote, than it is to drive.  Second, the reality is that these tighter ID requirements will make it more difficult for the poor and the minority voters to vote.  And this is all in the name of rooting out alleged fraud, which the Georgia Republicans, such as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has admitted, is nonexistent.

What is even more outlandish were the senators’ claims about H.R. 1, the voting rights expansion just passed by the House and is now before the Senate. “H.R. 1 is the biggest power grab in the history of the country. It institutionalizes ballot harvesting. It does away with the voter ID requirement,” Graham said.

And for Toomey, he said of H.R. 1, “We ought to be asking our Democratic colleagues: Why are they so insistent that we not have any mechanism to verify that a person seeking to vote is, in fact, the person that they say they are?”

And on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” As usual, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) had to top all of his Republican colleagues: “Democrats think we’d be better off if more murderers and rapists and child molesters were voting.”

Not surprisingly, every one of these tales is false. H.R. 1 can’t institutionalize fraudulent “ballot harvesting,” where political operatives tamper with collected absentee ballots, because it doesn’t exist. (The closest similar incident, in 2018, actually involved a Republican in North Carolina.) Nor does it do away with voter ID laws; it just allows voters to provide a written statement in place of ID, a system already used successfully in a number of states. (It’s also worth noting that more than a dozen states — including red states such as Wyoming and Nebraska, have no voter ID requirements.)

And as usual, Cruz’s claim is the biggest whopper. The bill would restore voting rights to anyone convicted of a crime, only after they have served their sentence, equal to or tougher than the standard already used in much of the country, including Cruz’s home state of Texas.

Any truly democratic system should make it as easy as possible to exercise one’s right to vote while maintaining the system’s integrity. H.R. 1 understands that we’ve succeeded remarkably well on the latter count, and focuses instead on the former, by reducing restrictions that have no practical effect except making it more difficult for some Americans to vote.

The question is whether there are 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus who recognize the importance of this remedy. Most otherwise pro-filibuster senators, such as Angus King (I-Maine), realize that “all-out opposition to reasonable voting rights protections cannot be enabled by the filibuster.” But Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) continues to insist that he’ll need bipartisan support before he will back the whole bill, leaving it one vote short.

In the short term, other Democrats can still indulge Manchin’s naivete and expand voting rights. While H.R. 1 is up in the air, the Senate is also considering House-passed legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act, which was renewed numerous times on a bipartisan basis until a conservative Supreme Court gutted it in 2013.

If, as one suspects, Republicans now declare the Voting Rights Act a “partisan horror”, perhaps the scales will fall from the West Virginian’s eyes.  But in the longer term, Democrats must, take heart from the size and number of the GOP’s distortions.  That Republicans’ excuses for inaction are (even by GOP standards) so thin, it shows the scale of the problem; that they are so panicked about H.R. 1, it bodes well for its effectiveness when it is finally passed.

The battle for everybody having voting rights is very long, but it is well worth winning.

Copyright G. Ater 2021