The voting rights bill snaking through Congress is pushing GOP buttons.
“‘H.R. 1 is an attempt to use the Democrats’ slim majority to unlevel the playing field and take away the rights of roughly half of the voters in the country,’ said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant based in Ohio and an election law attorney.”
Republicans have exactly half the U.S. Senate seats, won with 41.5 million fewer votes, and in Wisconsin they controlled two-thirds of state Assembly seats after getting only 46% of the votes. The story is much the same in other states, where relentless gerrymandering by GOP-controlled legislatures has produced extremely unrepresentative governments. The last thing they want is to level the playing field.
“In Arizona, another battleground seeing an onslaught of election-related legislative battles, state Rep. John Kavanagh, a Republican, told CNN, ‘Democrats value as many people as possible voting, and they’re willing to risk fraud. Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote — but everybody shouldn’t be voting.'”
Study after study has shown that voting fraud is all but non-existent. The GOP claims of “fraud” in the 2020 election, now being used by GOP legislators in dozens of states to justify voting restrictions blatantly targeting black voters, are utterly fraudulent in and of themselves.
And we’ve now seen that when America’s voters refuse to elect Republicans, they’ll try to violently overthrow the election results, even attacking police.
Democrats are fully justified in cracking down hard on Republican schemes to take away our right to vote and establish a rightwing dictatorship in America. Nothing should stop these efforts, least of all the filibuster. No one is taking away their rights, or trying to. This is about leveling the playing field. It’s about making them earn the right to govern by getting more votes in fair elections. Whether they like it or not is irrelevant. This is necessary to protect our rights.
In any case, fair elections aren’t an existential threat to the GOP, unless they choose to remain a rogue party driven by racism and crazy conspiracy theories, and rally behind candidates like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor-Greene. The Democrats aren’t always right, and don’t have all the answers. Our country needs a competitive multi-party (at least two) system.
Republicans could legitimately win elections by becoming respectable again, and competing with better candidates and ideas. The only thing standing in their way is themselves. They are their own worst enemies.
Read story here.