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Forget Dr. Seuss And Cancel Culture – The Real GOP Agenda Is Rolling Back Voting

From coast to coast, the party is engaged in the "second great disenfranchisement in American history," says one voting law expert.

www.huffpost.com

WASHINGTON — Just weeks into an era of a new Democratic White House and Congress pushing through their priorities, Republicans appear to have settled on an agenda of their own.

No, not Dr. Seuss or “cancel culture” or breaking up Big Tech or any of the culture war topics that dominate their fundraising appeals and the Fox News evening programming, but the singular issue on which they seem to believe their future success will depend: making it harder for poorer people and communities to vote.

From Juneau, Alaska, to Tallahassee, Florida, and dozens of statehouses in between, Republicans are pushing legislation to cut early voting, eliminate ballot collection boxes, end “no-excuse” absentee voting and undo laws designed to make voting easier, particularly for voters who historically have not engaged in elections. According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, there are already 253 such bills in 43 states and counting.

“We’re in the second great disenfranchisement in American history,” said David Schultz, a professor of election law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, ranking our current times just below the Jim Crow years that followed the failure of Reconstruction.

The new term of art for the GOP’s efforts is “election integrity” — a phrase that dovetails with former President Donald Trump’s repeated lie that the Nov. 3 election had been “stolen” from him, which ultimately fueled the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the Capitol.

Both Trump’s attorney general and top elections security officials refuted Trump’s falsehoods about the election and said there was no significant fraud. Nevertheless, most Republican leaders have not made such a declaration.

Just two days after the deadly attack on the Capitol, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel promised that she would visit state capitols and lobby for new laws to “make sure that what we saw in this election never happens again.”

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Trying to prevent people entitled to vote from doing so goes back more than a century, to the end of Reconstruction following the Civil War.

The disputed presidential election of 1876 brought the deal that put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for an end to Reconstruction and its efforts to enforce civil rights, including the right to vote, for recently freed Black people.

Almost immediately, white terror squads began threatening and intimidating Black residents who tried to exercise their rights — efforts that became formalized in the “Jim Crow” laws that effectively enforced second-class citizenship on Blacks and made voting nearly impossible for them.

Ironically, reformers pushing for civil rights laws in the decades to come had as some of their strongest allies Republicans in Congress. Indeed, as Democrat Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, the arms he had to twist most were those of Southern Democrats, not Republicans.

But within four years, that alignment began flipping on its head, as GOP nominee Richard Nixon actively wooed disaffected Democrats to win in 1968. All over the country, but particularly in the South, Democrats motivated by racial resentment began switching parties. White grievance became a core GOP issue, and eventually a consuming one with the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president, in 2008.

“It started when the segregationist Democrats became Republicans, but really ramped up with Obama’s election,” said Norm Ornstein, a scholar with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.