It seems clear that an Iron Curtain, to use Winston Churchill's phrase, has descended across the American Southland. As a nation, we have worked for decades to encourage our public to participate in the nation's civic life by voting. Many have marched, protested, been arrested and beaten to make sure that the right to vote would not be abridged in the United States of America. Each election has seen a decline in the participation of more and more citizens. It seemed that we were beginning to turn that around through things like the "motor-voter" laws and online voting. Renewal of the Voting Rights Act has been approved by huge bipartisan majorities in the Congress right into the 21st century. Then the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted that law. It's not that it can't be enforced, it's that enforcing it will be much more difficult to do.
The reason the Court gave for its action was that pre-certification is no longer necessary. Within two hours of the decision, their reason was demonstrated to be fallacious. Texas, one of the states that had been subjected to pre-certification, passed draconian voter identification laws, rolling the right to vote back to where it was when Martin Luther King marched in the 50's and 60's. Pre-certification state North Carolina was next and Florida will soon follow. The Iron Curtain is descending and the promise of our nation is being trashed.
How big a problem is voter fraud in the U.S.? Since 2000, about 10 cases of in-person voter fraud have been reported in the country. All but one was dismissed, and the one was caught and never actually voted. So these states are solving a problem that doesn't exist. Why? What's going on here?
The Republican Party, now under the control of its extreme right wing, has realized that minorities, the young, the old and the poor tend to vote Democratic. Rather than coming up with policies that will help these constituencies, they have decided to fight this rear guard battle. These laws are designed to prevent them from voting. The processes required to get acceptable ID's for people without driver's licenses or access to birth certificates or who are students in the state is arduous and trying. When it was the Southern Democrats suppressing the vote back before the Voting Rights Act there were poll taxes and "literacy" tests that were used to prevent "undesirables" from voting. The mechanisms are different but the goal is the same. The harsh reality for the Republicans is that their constituency of white males is becoming a minority of aging curmudgeons. These moves will only delay their descent into irrelevance.
They must be stopped and defeated in every election everywhere it is possible. They have a core of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers who operate quietly behind the scenes to fund seizing and holding state government's and therefore control the redistricting and voting process. What can be done? We need a new civil rights movement. Not founded on racial equality, but rather upon citizenship equality. We need massive marches on the state capitols of those states behind the Iron Curtain and those in danger of disappearing behind it, like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. We need to mobilize to help people negotiate the multiple obstacles to voting and then vote out those state legislators and governors whose agenda is to withhold the right to vote so that they may keep their dying grip on power for a few more years.
I marched for equality in the 1960's and I am prepared to march again decades later. Are you in? Will you stand with me and those like me who are determined to defend the United States of America against these domestic threats?
