“Voter Purging”: There’s A Lot Of Darkness In The Sunshine State
Florida ought to know better. And must do better, particularly on the issue of voting and discrimination.
But, then again, we are talking about Florida, the state of Bush v. Gore infamy and the one that will celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, with a statewide holiday on Sunday.
What am I getting at? This: Few states in the union have done more in recent years to restrict and suppress voting — particularly by groups who lean Democratic, such as young people, the poor and minorities — than Florida.
In May 2011, the state’s Republican-led Legislature passed and the Republican governor, Rick Scott, signed a sweeping election law that cut early voting short and imposed onerous burdens on voter registration groups by requiring them to turn in registration applications within 48 hours of the time they are signed or face fines.
The threat of fines has meant that many groups that traditionally registered voters in the state have abandoned the effort, and it appears to be contributing to fewer new registrations. According to a March analysis of registration data by The Times, “in the months since its new law took effect in May, 81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election.”
But there is good news. On Thursday, a federal judge overturned the 48-hour deadline as unconstitutional, writing, in part, that “if the goal is to discourage voter-registration drives and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register, the 48-hour deadline may succeed.”
Recently, the state announced that it would begin another round of voter purging to ensure that no ineligible voters were mistakenly on the voter rolls. Seems noble enough. But the problem is that Florida is notoriously bad at purging.
As the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice pointed out last week: “In 2000, Florida’s efforts to purge persons with criminal convictions from the rolls led to, by conservative estimates, close to 12,000 eligible voters being removed” from the rolls. As most of us remember, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the state of Florida that year, after the recounts and the Supreme Court stepped in, by 537 votes.
And as The Miami Herald reported on Thursday:
“So far, Florida has flagged 2,700 potential noncitizen voters and sent the list to county elections supervisors, who have found the data and methodology to be flawed and problematic. The list of potential noncitizen voters — many of whom have turned out to be lawful citizens and voters — disproportionately hits minorities, especially Hispanics.”
More good news: In his keynote address at the inaugural Faith Leaders Summit on Voting Rights, a joint effort by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. told the group:
“Congressman John Lewis may have described the reason for these concerns best, in a speech on the House floor last summer, when pointing out that the voting rights he worked throughout his life — and nearly gave his life — to ensure are, ‘under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.’ Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent fears and frustrations about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.”
He didn’t mention Florida by name, but, on Thursday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Florida secretary of state demanding that they cease the purge.
Florida has more electoral votes than any other swing state, and the battle to win it — or steal it — will be epic because the election is likely to be another nail-biter, both nationally and in the state.
In an NBC-Marist poll of battleground states released last week, President Obama was leading Mitt Romney in the state 48 percent to 44 percent. But as NBC News pointed out, the president’s share was “below the 50 percent threshold usually considered safe haven for an incumbent president,” and Romney has narrowed the races in Florida and other battleground states since earlier in the year.
A Quinnipiac University Poll also released last week had Romney leading Obama by 6 points in Florida, although there has been some debate about the methodology of that poll.
We can’t predict a winner, but we must insist on a fair fight. Voter suppression can’t be allowed to overshadow democracy in the Sunshine State.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 1, 2012
“Letting The Right People Vote”: Control And Power Through Voter Suppression
For some years, the Republican party has tried to convince Americans that they have put their ugly legacy on issues of race behind them, that Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Willie Horton have no relationship to the GOP of today. They call themselves the “party of Lincoln,” hoping people will forget that the Republican and Democratic parties were very different in 1864 than they are today. (Consider: If the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the leading lights of the GOP had been alive 150 years ago, which side would they have been on? The answer seems pretty obvious.) Sometimes, they may even go as far as the National Review did recently, publishing an unintentionally hilarious cover article claiming that Republicans are the real civil-rights heroes, because the Democratic party was once home to white Southern segregationists, so there! Never mind that those folks, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, eventually found their rightful home in the Republican party, as part of the realignment process that gave us the parties of today.
The protestations would be a little more convincing if every election—every election, without fail—didn’t see Republicans searching for new ways to exploit white racial animus and, more importantly, keep minorities from voting. This year’s election will be no different; Republicans are working harder than ever to make sure that if you’re not their kind of person, you will find voting as difficult as possible. That doesn’t mean that deep in their hearts Republicans are racists. It isn’t about hate. It’s about power.
This isn’t anything new. The history of voting in America is one of vicious battles over who would be able to cast ballots, battles that go well beyond the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which extended voting rights to blacks and women, respectively. For decades, dozens of states had “pauper exclusions” on their books preventing poor people from voting. In some cases that meant that only property owners were allowed to vote; in other cases, going on any form of public assistance meant giving up your franchise. Incredibly, these laws were not finally repealed in most places until the 1960s. As Alexander Keyssar detailed in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, classes of people with power have always sought to restrict the ability of those without power to vote:
They did so both to defend their own interests and because their beliefs and prejudices led them to view others as something less than responsible or worthy citizens. Most men did not want to enfranchise women until the twentieth century; most whites did not want to enfranchise blacks or other racial minorities in their own states; the native-born often were resistant to granting suffrage to immigrants; the wealthy at times sought to deny political citizenship to the poor; established community residents preferred to fence out new arrivals. There is nothing peculiarly American or particularly surprising about these patterns; those who possess political power commonly are reluctant to share it, and they have easily developed or embraced ideas that justify and legitimize that reluctance.
At various times in their histories, both political parties have sought partisan advantage in keeping certain people from the polls. But it has been some time since the Democratic party had a means by which to exclude whole classes of people from voting. The most reliable Republican voters today are groups like older white men. Even the most creative legislator would have a tough time coming up with some way to take away their voting rights.
But the reliably Democratic groups—blacks, Hispanics, poor people, young people—are easier to go after. You don’t have to stop all of them from voting, just enough to make a difference. And few things work better than voter ID laws, since those who don’t have such an ID are so much more likely to be the kind of people who vote Democratic. The fact that people impersonating other people at the polls is so rare as to be almost non-existent matters not at all. Write a voter ID law, and the cruder methods of keeping minorities from voting become less necessary. You don’t have to spend as much time distributing flyers in black neighborhoods threatening people with prosecution if they go to the wrong polling place, or mailing notices to voters claiming that if they have any unpaid parking tickets they won’t be allowed to vote, or posting signs around the neighborhood saying that the election has been moved to Wednesday.
All those things have happened may times before. But after their success in taking control of state legislatures in 2010, Republicans decided that kind of thing was for amateurs. You don’t need election day shenanigans if you’ve passed a law disenfranchising the right people. Minorities may be at the core of these efforts, but it isn’t just about them. Young people, college students, ex-felons, anyone who might be more likely to vote Democratic has been targeted by eager Republican legislators elected in the 2010 sweep. A dozen states with Republican legislatures have erected new barriers to voting since 2010. These barriers include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and laws barring all ex-felons from voting. And no state’s Republicans have moved as aggressively as Florida, which has a bit of a history with this sort of thing.
You may have forgotten it by now, but the razor-thin margin of the 2000 presidential race there had its roots well before election day, when governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris assembled a list of people who were allegedly ex-felons and should therefore lose their voting rights. It turned out that thousands of them weren’t ex-felons at all, but just had names that resembled someone who had committed a felony. But too bad – they lost the right to vote anyway. In the last few years, Florida has passed an ID law, and passed a law imposing absurdly onerous requirements on those who register voters (voter registration is always a part of liberal and Democratic organizing campaigns). They also restricted early voting, most importantly by eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the election. Why that Sunday? Well, many black churches were organizing “Souls to the Polls” voting drives after church on that day. The Republicans solved that problem. And most recently, the government of Republican governor Rick Scott told local boards of elections to purge tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls, on the grounds that they might not be citizens. Many Florida citizens have already gotten threatening letters from the government, telling them they had 30 days to prove their citizenship or lose the right to vote.
Many of these plainly partisan moves are under legal challenge, but our system unfortunately allows much of what Republicans are trying to do. For instance, when the 2000 election controversy revealed the miasma of corruption and incompetence that was the Florida election system, many people were amazed that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of running the election, could be allowed to serve as state co-chair of one of the competing presidential campaigns. The idea that Bush co-chair Katherine Harris was an objective arbiter of election rules and processes was beyond absurd; it was like going to a Yankees-Red Sox game and learning that the home-plate umpire was also the Yankees’ batting coach. But that’s perfectly fine in America; you might remember that four years later, the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell (the state co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign) responded to a successful Democratic registration campaign by issuing a decree that any registration form not printed on heavy card stock would be declared invalid (his order was overturned by a court). And just recently the Arizona Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, declared that he might not allow Barack Obama on the state’s ballot, since he wasn’t convinced Obama was actually born in the United States. Bennett, who eventually backed off his birtherism, is–you guessed it–the state co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Few things are more absurd than to hear Republicans claim that in enacting restrictive voting laws, they are motivated not a whit by partisanship, but only by their deep and abiding concern for the integrity of the ballot. The Republicans who swept into office at all levels in 2010 had a policy agenda, to do things like restrict reproductive rights, roll back environmental and consumer regulations, and cut taxes. But their political agenda, designed to increase the chances that they will retain power, got nearly as much of their attention. And few things can more effectively ensure that you’ll retain power than making it harder for the wrong kind of people to vote.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
“Violating Basic Civil Rights”: Gov Rick Scott’s Florida Voter Purge Gets Pushback From Elections Supervisors And U.S. Justice Dept
Florida elections supervisors said Friday they will discontinue a state-directed effort to remove names from county voter rolls because they believe the state data is flawed and because the U.S. Department of Justice has said the process violates federal voting laws.
Late Thursday, the Department of Justice sent Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner a letter telling him that an effort launched by Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration last year to remove the names of people believed to be non-citizens from voter rolls appears to violate at least two federal voting laws. The federal agency gave Detzner until Wednesday to respond.
The Justice Department letter and mistakes that the 67 county elections supervisors have found in the state list make the scrub undoable, said Martin County Elections Supervisor Vicki Davis, president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections.
“There are just too many variables with this entire process at this time for supervisors to continue,” Davis said.
Ron Labasky, the association’s general counsel, sent a memo to the 67 supervisors Friday telling them to stop processing the list.
“I recommend that Supervisors of Elections cease any further action until the issues raised by the Department of Justice are resolved between the parties or by a Court,” Labasky wrote.
Davis said the effect on supervisors will be “if they’ve started the process and they do find out that someone is ineligible to vote and they have credible and reliable information to back it up, then they will remove that person from the database. But if they have not had contact with someone on the list, they’re stopping at that point.”
Detzner in April sent supervisors a list of more than 2,600 voters his Division of Elections had identified as potential non-citizens by matching the state’s voter registration database with driver license records. Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher received 115 such names.
Supervisors were supposed to send letters to those on the list notifying them to provide proof of citizenship within 30 days or be removed from the voter rolls. But supervisors say they have found errors, including some on the list who have died, many who have become naturalized citizens since they first got their driver licenses, and others who are U.S.-born citizens — including a 91-year-old, Brooklyn-born World War II hero who now lives in Broward County.
Detzner’s spokesman, Chris Cate, said of the supervisors’ plan, “The supervisors have the ultimate duty of making the determination of eligibility. We respect the process and we have confidence in their capability to determine if someone is an ineligible voter or not.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department said the scrub appears to violate at least two federal National Voting Rights Act laws.
Five counties in Florida require federal approval before any voting or election changes are made for those counties, but Detzner did not seek approval from the Justice Department or a federal court, according to the letter written by T. Christian Herren, chief of the Justice Department’s voting section.
Florida’s current effort also appears to violate the National Voting Right Act’s prohibition on any major voter scrub 90 days before an election, Herron wrote. With an Aug. 14 primary scheduled in Florida, that would prohibit scrubs after May 16.
Herren gave Detzner until Wednesday to respond “so that the Department can determine what further action, if any, is necessary.”
Detzner issued a press release Friday indicating he will respond on time but will not back down from the state’s effort.
“As Florida’s Chief Election Officer, I am committed to ensuring the accuracy of Florida’s voter rolls and the integrity of our elections. . . . The Department will continue to act in a responsible and cautious manner when presented with credible information about potentially ineligible voters. No one that has the right to vote has been denied the opportunity to cast a vote, and as the Secretary, it is my duty to ensure that remains the case,” Detzner said.
Cate said the agency disagrees with the federal department’s interpretation of the 90-day restriction on voter list maintenance.
“We’ll address that specifically in our response to DOJ,” he said. “We have a year-round responsibility to make sure ineligible voters cannot cast a ballot.”
Detzner also has blamed federal officials for the faulty data. On Thursday, he sent a request to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for access to its Systematic Alien Verification of Eligibility database so that his department could use it to identify potentially ineligible voters.
Last month the state’s Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles volunteered to help state elections officials by using its access to the federal database to check Florida’s list of suspected non-citizens. But this week the highway department determined it is only allowed to use the list to check the names of people who are applying for driver licenses or state identification cards, DHSMV spokeswoman Courtney Heidelberg said.
The effort to remove names of immigrants from voter rolls has sparked accusations from civil-rights and liberal groups that Scott’s Republican administration is trying to suppress voter turnout in November in the crucial swing state of Florida.
“The question no one is asking is why are they doing this,” said Progress Florida Political Director Damien Filer. “The fact is Rick Scott is carrying on a disgraceful GOP legacy of disenfranchising voters in Florida. And he’s doing it on purpose. Sadly, Florida is once again a late-show punch line. Jon Stewart and Jay Leno are no doubt thrilled. Florida voters, not so much.”
In 2000, thousands of eligible voters were not allowed to vote because of an error-riddled felon voter list created under Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration. State officials abandoned another problematic felon voter list four years later.
Liberal activists started an online petition at credoaction.com asking the Justice Department to intervene, and Democrats, including Boca Raton U.S. Rep. Ted Deutch, have asked Scott’s administration to abandon the effort.
GOP leaders also intensified the rhetoric this week.
Republican Party of Florida Chairman Lenny Curry urged supporters to call or e–mail the White House to demand that the Homeland Security department give Detzner access to its database.
“While Democrats and their liberal special interests demagogue the important issue of securing our elections, they seem happy to accept that illegal voters may be in our system,” Curry said on the party’s website, rpof.org. “Florida’s Republicans believe the vote is the foundation of our democracy, and it is too important to allow even one illegal vote to be cast.”
Florida Democratic Party Executive Director Scott Arceneaux responded, “Pointing the finger at SAVE or other databases is a smokescreen and it’s a red herring for a system that’s clearly rife with error.”
By: Dara Kam, Staff Writer, The Palm Beach Post, June 2, 2012
“Here They Go Again”: How Florida Governor Rick Scott Could Steal The Election For Mitt Romney
On Wednesday, November 7, Mitt Romney could wake up as the President-elect thanks to one man: Florida Governor Rick Scott. With little fanfare, Scott is undertaking an audacious plan to kick thousands of Floridians off the ballot just before this year’s elections. It’s a sloppy, chaotic and possibly illegal plan. But it just might work. Here’s how:
1. Scott has created a massive list of Floridians to purge from the voting rolls before the election. Late last year, Governor Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” But Browning did not have access to reliable citizenship data. The state attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing the voting file with data from the state motor vehicle administration, but the motor vehicle data does not contain updated citizenship information. The process, which created a list of 182,000 people, was considered so flawed by Browning that he refused to release the data to county election officials. Browning resigned in February and Scott has pressed forward with the purge, starting with about 2600 voters.
2. The list of “ineligible” voters is riddled with errors and includes hundreds of eligible U.S. citizens. According to data obtained by ThinkProgress, in Miami-Dade county alone, 1638 people were flagged by the state as “non-citizens.” Already, 359 people on the list have provided the county with proof of citizenship and 26 people were identified as U.S. citizens directly by the county. The remaining 1200 have simply not responded to the letter informing them of their purported ineligibility. Similar problems have been identified in Polk County and Broward County.
3. Scott’s list is heavily targeted at Democratic and Hispanic voters. A study by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls.” For example, Hispanics comprise 58 percent of the list but just 13 percent of eligible voters. Conversely, “Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”
4. Florida election officials have acknowledged that, as a result of Scott’s voter purge, eligible voters will be removed from the rolls. “It will happen,” Mary Cooney, a spokeswoman for the Broward County Supervisor of Elections, told ThinkProgress. On or about June 9, anyone who hasn’t responded to the ominous and legalistic letter informing them of their purported ineligibility will be removed from the rolls. Some eligible voters won’t have been able to respond by that time due to travel, work obligations, family obligations or confusion as to the purpose of the letter. Some will forget to open it. Others may have moved.
5. Florida will likely be a close contest in 2012 and purging eligible Democratic and Hispanic voters could tip the balance to Romney. In the latest Real Clear Politics average of polling in the state, Romney and Obama are separated by just 0.5 percent. Hundreds of eligible voters in Democratic strongholds, wrongfully purged from the rolls, could easily make the difference for Romney.
6. Winning Florida could clinch the election for Mitt Romney. Nationally, the race between Obama and Romney is within two points. It’s expected to be close all the way to election day and Florida’s 29 electorial votes would be the deciding factor in many plausable electorial scenarios.
Will history repeat itself in Florida this year? By one estimate, 7000 Florida voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls for the 2000 presidential election — 13 times George W. Bush’s margin of victory in that state after the U.S. Supreme Court halted the post-election recount.
By: Judd Legum, Think Progress, May 28, 2012
“Insurgent Outliers”: Today’s GOP Is The Worst Political Party Since The Civil War
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the Washington Post with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case. Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last summer’s debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so irresponsibly that Standard & Poor’s felt compelled to downgrade America’s hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the Republicans of “brinksmanship” and said they had caused American governance and policymaking to become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable that we previously believed.” They were particularly alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip over fiscal policy.
Looking back at that debacle, Steve Benen recently wrote, “It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War.”
When I first read that, it struck me as a preposterous statement. What about the Jim Crow laws, or the Palmer raids, or the Japanese internment camps, or McCarthyism, or the Vietnam and Iraq wars? But when I started to think about it, I realized that many of the big mistakes our country has made since the Civil War were not really the result of one political party’s actions. The Jim Crow laws are, of course, associated with the Democratic Party. But only the Southern half of the Democratic Party. Wartime measures, like the Palmer Raids during World War I, the internment camps of World War II, COINTELPRO during Vietnam, or illegal surveillance and detainee abuse during the current War on Terror, have been instigated less by political parties than by particular administrations, or they have had significant bipartisan support. The same can be said for our country’s decisions to fight in Vietnam and Iraq. In these cases, the blame is both too narrow in one sense, and too broad in another, to lay all the blame on a single party. Even McCarthyism can’t be laid squarely on the GOP, since much of the Republican establishment, including the Eisenhower administration, wasn’t too pleased with it. The debt ceiling fiasco was different. Here’s how Benen described it:
It was a move without parallel. The entirety of a party threatened to deliberately hurt the country unless their rivals paid a hefty ransom — in this case, debt reduction. It didn’t matter that Republicans were largely responsible for the debt in the first place, and it didn’t matter that Republicans routinelyraised the debt ceiling dozens of times over the last several decades.This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. This one radical scheme helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it severely undermined American credibility on the global stage. Indeed, in many parts of the world, observers didn’t just lose respect for us, they were actually laughing at us.
It’s the kind of thing that should have scarred the Republican Party for a generation. Not only did that never happen, the Republican hostage-takers are already vowing to create this identical crisis all over again, on purpose.
Benen is right. It’s not easy to identify other examples where an American political party acted with such reckless disregard for the good of the country. But when I really think about it, the Debt Ceiling Fiasco isn’t a stand-alone thing. It’s part of a continuum. You can’t just cherry-pick the Debt Ceiling Fiasco and forget about the politicization of the Department of Justice, or putting an Arabian horse trader in charge of New Orleans’ safety, or blowing off any planning and just declaring, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” What’s the worst thing the GOP has done in the 17 years since they first took control of Congress? The Gingrich shutdowns of the federal government? Impeaching President Clinton? Using their majority on the Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election? Standing around like mute apes while the housing bubble inflated?
It’s not that the Debt Ceiling Fiasco was the worst or stupidest thing that any political party has imposed on America in 150 years. It’s that the Republican Party is the worst party we’ve had in 150 years. You might argue that they don’t have much competition. “So, they’re worse than the Democrats, big deal.” But parties don’t remain the same over time. In one sense, they change every two years following each federal election cycle. It’s best to think of iterations of our political parties.
For the GOP, there’s the abolitionist Lincoln iteration, the Reconstruction iteration, the McKinley/Taft iteration, the Teddy Roosevelt Era, the Roaring ’20s iteration, the FDR oppositional phase, the Eisenhower era, the Nixon/Ford iteration, the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Bush era, and finally the post-Bush era. And there’s no need to box things into tight little categories. It makes sense to talk about the post-Bush Republican Party, but we can also talk about the post-Nixon party or consider the contemporary GOP on a timeline beginning with its 1994 takeover of Congress.
I think it’s fair to say that the GOP that exists today, as expressed by both its behavior in Congress and its recent display in the presidential primaries, is worse than it has ever been. The Republicans of the 113th Congress are worse than the Republicans of the 112th, who were worse than the 111th, and so on.
There’s a scene in the movie Office Space in which the main character is talking to a psychologist. He complains that every day seems worse than the last. The psychologist says, “That means that every day is the worst day of your life.” The protagonist agrees, which leads the psychologist to observe impassively, “That’s messed up.” That’s a great metaphor for the modern Republican Party. The Debt Ceiling Fiasco, which is now set to be repeated, was merely a temporary nadir on an otherwise constant 45º downward slope.
A blogger who goes by the nom de guerre driftglass recently wrote about New York Times columnist David Brooks’ tendency to “waddle into the threshing blades.” I like that imagery. That’s what the Republicans have been doing to the country for a while now. Under Gingrich, they shut down the government and impeached the president after hounding him for six years with specious investigations. Then they disgraced the Supreme Court and stole the election away from its rightful winners. Then they dropped the ball on al-Qaeda. Next we wound up in Iraq with no plan.
From there it was on to Terri Schiavo and a drowned New Orleans and a failed attempt to privatize Social Security and a wrecked Department of Justice, and the Abramoff scandal. There was Guantanamo and black prisons and torture and murder and disaster in Afghanistan. When the stock market collapsed in September 2008, it might have seemed like the final culmination of a disastrous path embarked upon…when, exactly? 1964? 1980? 1994?
But the nightmare wasn’t over. In many ways, it was only starting. Yet to come were the Birthers and the Tea Party and the Tenthers and climate deniers. The party would begin a new Great Purge, sending Arlen Specter scurrying to the Democrats and defeating long-serving politicians like Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who survived on a write-in campaign), Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, and a couple dozen “Establishment” picks. Those that have survived are now cowering in fear, completely unwilling to compromise with the Democrats or the president on anything, lest they become the next victim. They can’t address climate change because, despite the fact that John McCain and Sarah Palin campaigned on a cap-and-trade carbon plan, the party’s officeholders are now afraid to admit that climate change is even occurring.
And who could have predicted that the party would go after women’s access to contraception?
And what of the new crop of Republican governors. Grifters like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Scott in Florida surely represent a new breed (and a new low) of radical state executives. Governors in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona and elsewhere are competing with each other to craft the most radical and unprecedented legislation. We have not seen a party this dangerous in any of our lifetimes. Not in this country, anyway. The last time things got this bad was about 150 years ago. The last time things got this bad, we needed a Civil War to resolve it.
By: Martin Longman, AlterNet, May 21, 2012
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