America’s politics have always been rowdy, and sometimes violent; if it’s bad now, it’s been much worse.
Here, Texas Democratic politician Beto O’Rourke describes some incidents from his state’s political past. For example:
- “After Reconstruction, states throughout the South were rife with White supremacist terrorism, racial injustice and attacks on Black voting rights — and by the late 19th century, Texas was among the most brutal. Whites-only Democratic clubs and their armed militias had ‘purified’ the ballot box in one Texas county after another. Political violence, assassinations and lynchings enforced White rule throughout much of the state at the expense of Black lives and Black voting rights.”
- “In the Washington County election of 1886, [the] ballot boxes in Black precincts were stolen at gunpoint by agents of a Whites-only political ring known as the ‘People’s Party.’ When Black poll workers dared to fight back at one of the precincts, they were arrested, and three of them — Shad Felder, Alfred Jones and Stewart Jones — were lynched by a mob.”
Although these outrages spurred initiatives in Congress to protect voting rights, those early legislative efforts were thwarted by Senate filibusters. It wasn’t until decades later, in the 1960s, that Congress — spurred in part by the brutal murders of three civil rights workers — finally authorized federal intervention to secure voting rights for blacks in states that denied or failed to protect those rights.
Today, we still see concerted efforts to prevent blacks from voting, mostly in the former Confederate states. We again have a major political party threatening political violence (see story here). And we see efforts in state legislatures to overthrow elections and overturn the voters’ will.
One of the takeaways from all this is that some states — specifically, those whose governments are GOP-controlled — can’t be trusted to preserve our democracy or respect their citizens’ right to vote. The federal government has to step in and secure those rights. This is an appropriate role for the feds because voting is an American right, no matter where you live, not a privilege conferred by states at their discretion. And where states go to war against that right, American citizens deserve federal protection.
But something to remember is that it’s been far, far worse. It could become that way again. That’s why we need a new federal voting rights law, even if it takes abolishing the filibuster to pass it. And that’s why we need vigorous prosecution of the Capitol rioters, and the organizers and perpetrators of the violence that occurred that day should get lengthy prison sentences. The time is ripe to forcefully deter political terrorism, or our nation once again will have to live with it.