“Stacey Abrams’ stark warning about Georgia’s new election bill being racist is shining a spotlight on a nationwide battle … as Republicans around the country try to suppress voting rights,” CNN said on Sunday, March 14, 2021. (Read story here.)
You’re going to hear a lot more about this in coming days. As CNN said, “The Georgia Democrat’s comments on CNN Sunday come amid a building showdown over GOP efforts to make voting harder … and Washington Democrats’ vast federal election and civil rights bill that would counter such efforts.”
There’s overwhelming evidence that, under Trump, the GOP is emerging as a white supremacy party. Their complaints about “fraudulent voting” in the 2020 election were almost exclusively directed against votes cast by black people (see article here).
Add the violent Capitol insurrection, and Trump has effectively turned the GOP into an adjunct of the Ku Klux Klan, and Republican grassroots supporters have willingly gone along with it, which makes all of them racists, too.
Take Capitol Stürmer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli (photo above, story here), for example. He’s a white supremacist who dresses up in a Hitler haircut and mustache (so nobody can mistake where his sympathies lie). He was a “security contractor” at a Navy weapons depot (but you can bet he isn’t anymore).
Or Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who said he didn’t feel threatened by the Capitol rioters, but would have if they’d been from Black Lives Matter (story here), never mind there have been over 11,000 BLM protests and 96% of them were 100% peaceful (see article here). He’s a racist, too. I mean, how is that not racist?
And there are, of course, the murders of black people by white police, which probably isn’t unrelated to the fact that the KKK, militias, and white supremacists have been infiltrating their members into police ranks for years (see article here).
The best thing you can say about Republicans is they’re not trying to overthrow democracy per se, only the elections they lose; and they’re not against democracy in principle, but are only trying to limit participation in it to white people.
This is more ambitious and brazen than the old-time segregationists even dreamed of. They would be jealous.
There’s a big fight coming over the voting rights bill, which has already passed the House, and can only pass the Senate by defeating Republican efforts to filibuster it. The stakes are enormous, and for the Democrats, this is must-pass legislation. So they’ll scrap the filibuster if they have to, but first they’ll try to get H.R. 1 (the voting rights bill) and other high-priority legislation through by making it harder to use. That almost certainly will take the form of requiring Republicans to actually filibuster bills, i.e., get up and talk until they drop.
Here’s another point about the filibuster: The 50 Republican senators were elected with 40 million fewer votes than the 50 Democratic senators, so the small minority of Americans represented by the 50 GOP senators already have an outsized say in legislation, and aren’t entitled to more; and that minority also is grossly overrepresented in the House because of gerrymandering. At what point do we stop allowing a small minority to dictate terms to most of us? If there was ever a time, and an issue, to give the majority of Americans a fair say in governing America (see article here), this is it.
But beyond the legislative battles in Congress and state legislatures, there are bigger implications for our politics. One, we now have only one political party. There’s the Democrats, and the Ku Klux Klan. Two, issues thought settled decades ago suddenly are unsettled; America has to fight the race battles of the 1950s and 1960s all over again. Third, loss of the GOP as a political party, due to its conversion into a domestic terrorism organization, will distort American politics into something we haven’t seen before in our history: A one-party political system.
All of this is the fault of Republicans, every bit of it, and results from their decision — collectively and individually — to be racists instead of Americans.