Republicans wanted to lock her up in prison for knocking on the governor’s door while he was signing a voting law everyone else thinks is racist voter suppression.
Standing between the governor’s goons and state Rep. Park Cannon, door knocker, was Fani Willis, another black woman and Democratic office-holder.
Willis is the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, where Atlanta (with its large black population), the state capitol, and — inconveniently for Gov. Brian Kemp — the governor’s signing desk are situated.
In his previous gig as Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp was the GOP’s chief voting roll purger and principal architect of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts in that state, i.e., the Kris Kobach of Georgia.
Willis, in very predictably declining to prosecute Cannon, said, “While some of Representative Cannon’s colleagues … may have found her behavior annoying, such sentiment does not justify a presentment to a grand jury of … felony charges,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in an emailed statement. In other words, annoying racists isn’t a crime in her jurisdiction. (For fun, juxtapose Cannon’s peaceful protest against the Republican rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6. The hypocrisy is endless.)
Protesting against racism in Georgia has gotten harder to persecute since the days when Ku Klux Klansmen ruled the roost, because Atlanta’s black voters — if they can get to the polls with I.D. and brave hunger and thirst in hours-long waiting lines engineered by Republican election officials — now possess the power to elect a black district attorney who won’t enforce Jim Crow b.s. against them and their elected representatives.
The whole point of GOP voter suppression is getting rid of public officials like Cannon and Willis, and replacing them with good ol’ white boys, by keeping black voters from voting. That’s what the fight over Georgia Republicans’ new voter suppression law is fundamentally about.
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