mt wrote:
Hi Robert,
In your post, you say “reinstating Jim Crow voting restrictions on Black people and a Republican Supreme Court threw out a landmark civil rights law called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”
Can you cite cases where Jim Crow like voting restrictions have been put in place? Also, The Voting Rights Act was not thrown out. Only one or two sections were considered unconstitutional. These deal with certain states and municipalities being required to get pre-approval for certain voting changes, e.g. moving poling locations, redistricting.
In your comments, you refer to the “racist war on US Blacks.” Can you add some detail to this phrase? I assume the Supreme Court’s decision to find certain parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as part of the war. What else?
Thanks for the response.
Your first charge is false. Those states were still under Voting Rights Act restrictions and they were being monitored by the Civil Rights branch of the federal government. Many other states were also being monitored, but they stopped violating the Voting Rights Act by suppressing Black votes, so they were freed from supervision. The only reason that those states were still under the supervision of the DOJ Civil Rights Department is because they keep incessantly violating the Voting Rights Act by suppressing the Black vote. We have been spanking them over and over about this since 1965, but they just cannot help themselves. These states are the equivalent of incorrigible career criminals.
The Supreme Court said that they need to be freed from supervision because such supervision was unfair. It was not unfair. It was proper oversight for incorrigible voting rights violators. The Supreme Court basically set these voting rights career criminals free.
All the voter ID bullshit is about suppressing the Black vote. That’s all it is. It is all about keeping Black people from voting. Also, they are purging voting rolls in many places of suspected “illegal voters.” Almost all of the “illegal voters” are Black. Katharine Harris threw 60,000 Blacks off the rolls in 2000 saying they were illegal voters. Not one of them was. This has been going on in every state where the Republicans win and get a Republican Secretary of State. They immediately set about trying to suppress the Black vote.
The Supreme Court already threw out the Voting Rights Act by allowing Texas’ voter ID law to stay in place. There is no need for voter ID laws as voter fraud in the form of people voting twice in national elections simply does not exist. Nor does people voting once in one state and again in another state.
Furthermore, once you are denied because you have no ID, it is very hard to get back on the rolls. People are placed in the Kafkaesque position of trying to prove that they actually are who they are. They present former state voter ID’s student ID’s, former state ID cards, gas bills, electric bills, etc. and all of these are turned down. In other words, none of these are acceptable as voter ID’s. Presumably all of these are faked, including the utility bills.
So as you can see here when many forms of ID’s are refused on the grounds that a human being is pretending to be someone else, this stuff isn’t even about fighting nonexistent voter fraud in national elections. It’s about suppressing the Black vote. This ought to be illegal as it is similar to Jim Crow era poll taxes, but the Supreme Court said it is legal.
Furthermore, in many locales, early voting rights have been restricted. Voting hours have been severely restricted, weekend voting cut off and the number of days you can vote early has been restricted. There is no reason for this other than to suppress Black and democratic votes. This is voter suppression and it ought to be illegal. And anyone putting these policies in place should go to jail.
7 million people are on Republican database of suspected illegal voters. They are suspected of voting once in one state and another time in another state. The list is insane and probably not one person did this. Almost all of these people are Black, Hispanic or Asian.
The Republican racist war on Blacks is the attempt to keep Black people from voting, which was exactly what they were doing under Jim Crow.
A rightwing government that refuses to let people vote, suppresses the vote or steals the vote is by definition a fascist government. Fascists are far rightwing governments who reject democracy in favor of authoritarian rule. Therefore, the Republicans have been fascists since 2000 when they stole that election. A characteristic of fascism is a corrupt judiciary that legitimizes the rightwing authoritarian anti-democratic nature of the state. As you can see, the Supreme Court has done this over and over since 2000. Therefore we have a fascist Supreme Court.
Far rightwing governments are not necessarily fascist as long as they are democratic. However, any antidemocratic authoritarian regime is automatically a fascist state.