The Continuing Sabotage of Voters' Rights

The ghosts of America's racist past continue to haunt our country

These protestors in New York got the message the day after the 2020 election. (Photo by Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the daily outrages, making it hard to look back or project into the future. The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the aggressive speed with which numerous southern states have pushed to redraw their maps to deny the voice of Black voters are infuriating reminders of where we are in Trump’s America.

They demonstrate that America’s racist past is not dead and gone, rather it continues to provide too many people an oppressive vision for the future. But there is a thin silver lining here: The Republicans have nakedly exposed themselves as the eager heirs to Jim Crow, stripping away any last shreds of doubt about how and why Donald Trump has succeeded in securing their fealty.

A clearer picture emerges of the necessity of vanquishing white Christian nationalism and its adherents’ will to power. Think how satisfying it would be to defeat Republicans in the midterms who are convinced that their gerrymandered districts will ensure the success of their imagined righteous cause.

So the struggle currently underway is not just Trump’s latest trickery, but part and parcel of the long history of racism in America. Yes, the Civil War officially ended 161 years ago. The South lost, slavery was abolished and the 14th and 15th amendments sought to secure civil rights and voting rights for formerly enslaved African Americans.

Yet the Reconstruction era not only failed to protect a Black electorate, the reality of racial inequality and the continuing fervor to deny Black voices and whitewash our collective history remains a hateful feature of American life. This despite more than a century of efforts by determined Americans to right these wrongs.

January 6, 2021 offered an unavoidable exclamation point to this continuing sabotage of voters’ rights: One of Trump’s so-called “great patriots” paraded a Confederate flag inside our nation’s capitol for the first time ever, starkly signaling that the Civil War has never really ended for some Americans.

I’d like to share with you extended excerpts from two of my essays from the first months after that heinous day. Suffice to say, not only did the weight of Jan. 6 continued to hang heavily then, but so too did Trump’s determination to hold onto power by denying voters’ voices, a sick strategy that the Republican losers believed was their best way forward.

In the first essay, “From Insurrection to Voter Suppression,” I took the time to state first principles and remind us what sanity looks like. Here’s how I put it on March 19, just 10 weeks after the capitol attack.

In a sane world, elected Republicans would have followed up the insurrectionist horrors of January 6 by moving back toward reason and democracy. Instead, they’ve chosen to keep going.

In a sane world, GOP members of Congress would accept that the Big Lie of election fraud had taken them and their party down a dark road of political violence, threats of assassination, and the promise of more violence to come from their extremist base.

But we are not living in a sane world, not when the response is to keep alive the question of whether Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were elected fair and square. In this refusal to acknowledge reality, we can smell the rank odor of conspiracist Trump and the other birthers (including his wife), determined to leave the sour impression that maybe, just maybe, Barrack Obama really wasn’t born in America.

And while this all may seem familiar from America’s viciously unjust Jim Crow past, we are not living in a sane world when Republicans applaud or stand by with brutal self-interest as 43 states aggressively push some 253 bills intended to suppress the vote.

Taken together, this follow-up to the insurrection may not be violence, per se, but it is violence against our democratic system in order to hold onto power—the will of the people be damned. It’s why we should pause and recognize the danger this portends, not only for the passage of a democratic agenda but to fend off the end of democracy and the imposition of autocracy by a sociopathic minority.

Let’s restate first principles: A healthy democracy makes it easier to vote, not harder. A healthy Senate votes in lockstep to strengthen our democracy, not fight tooth and nail to sabotage it. A healthy country never forgets, in word and deed, that one person, one vote is the sacred principle men and women have spilled blood and died for as long as we’ve had a republic—and even longer.

I’d suggest that the insurrection is not over; it’s just moved onto its next phase. Seventy-two days since the deadly attack on our Capitol, Republican members of Congress who helped incite this horrific event are still roaming freely in the halls of the Capitol, as if they are not culpable for their role.

And in a staggering display of hostility to the majority of Americans, particularly people of color, state compatriots from Georgia to Arizona are relishing their power-grabbing opportunity to rewrite state laws: Purge voters from the rolls, get rid of same-day and automatic voter registration, end mail-in and absentee voting, stop early and weekend voting, among other moves.

The need for Democrats to have responded with maximum force is even more painfully clear in hindsight. Recent events have underscored the tragedy of President Joe Biden’s failure to purge our country of the poison of Trump. Here’s how I described it in “The Struggle Between Light and Dark” from May 17, 2021:

Joe Biden is betting on optimism and his positive belief in Americans. He’s sticking with this even as the Republicans are pursuing a grimly cynical course to further divide voters and diminish democracy.

The stakes couldn’t be higher in this battle between light and dark and the opposing gravitational forces. The coming years will reveal whether a positive attitude and bold agenda have the power to persuade Republicans exploited by destructive leaders employing demagoguery to feed their hostilities and fears.

Biden’s rosy words can sound anachronistic, even disconnected from reality based on the toxic selfishness and cruelty of the Trump years and the fact that over 73 million Americans were willing to continue that downward spiral for another four years. Here’s what he said on a sunny day in the Rose Garden last Thursday:

“The simple truth is this: The American people have never, ever, ever, ever let their country down. Never…There’s nothing we are unable to do when we put our minds, our hearts, and our souls into it, and we do it together.”

Biden had more to say, painting a picture that not only can seem disorienting after the darkest days of the pandemic, but also hard to fully absorb after the continuing trauma of the insurrection and the ongoing efforts to deny voting rights and the truth of that deadly attack.

“We will rebuild our economy, reclaim our lives, and get back to normal,” he said. “We’ll laugh again. We’ll know joy again. And we’ll smile again—you know, and now see one another’s smile, look at the smiles on other people’s faces. Better days are ahead, I promise you.”

Even then, it was hard not to wonder whether Biden’s optimism really would win out, given the ability of Trump and his enablers to roil the body politic. As I wrote:

In a sane world, democratically elected members of the House and Senate—from both parties—would support voting rights, express their sustained horror over a heinous attack on the Capitol, work to tamp down political violence, reject white supremacy, and thank their lucky stars they can move beyond the former White House occupant. After all, this is the man who never won the approval of even half the country, aggressively sowed conflict and hate, attacked their own colleagues and incited a violent insurrection.

But we are witnessing the Republicans’ doubling down on a Trump-fueled strategy of lying about voter fraud and the election outcome, passing legislation across the country to limit the rights and access of voters, kowtowing to the former guy who’s facing myriad criminal prosecutions, and purging its own who dare to question the wisdom or truth of this.

I concluded the essay by questioning Biden’s optimism, which may have dulled his ability to see how critical it was to put an end to the criminality of Trump and his minions:

Joe Biden is betting that an optimistic tone and a constructive agenda that moves the country beyond the virus and adds millions of jobs will convince not only Democrats and independents, but also a growing number of Republicans still capable of believing in their better angels.

Is he right? I suspect it will take the flood of criminal prosecutions and convictions of insurrectionists, a growing number of prosecutions of corrupt Republicans like Matt Gaetz, and particularly the prosecution of one Donald J. Trump on various charges, including bank, tax and election fraud. (The jury is still out on how aggressively Merrick Garland will employ the tools of his department to seek justice against the leading insurrection inciter.)

It’s not that all this will shift their narrative, convincing them that they were wrong about him all along, but it will at least ensure that he never holds public office again and expand the numbers of voters exhausted by the endless drama.

We all know that Attorney General Merrick Garland never got to the inciter-in-chief, nor many of the other leading figures who hastened that day’s despicable events. Not only did Trump end up back in power, we have witnessed both his hunger for vengeance and his lawless determination to deploy his pardon power to free and resurrect the “patriotic” insurrectionists who used violence on his behalf. His latest plot to take $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars, put it in a slush fund and then hand it over to some of these same people and others he deems wronged by a weaponized Justice Department is another kick in our collective teeth.

And as much as you and I can hope that Trump’s eventual exit from the stage may be a critical turn for a better America, the anti-democratic Supreme Court and the wide swath of southern legislatures working to stamp out Black voices and trample on our democracy tells me that the fight will continue long after he’s gone.

That’s why we need fighters not folders to take office. That’s why we need to ensure massive turnout in November to ensure a blue wave that overcomes the racial hostility. That’s why, this time, accountability must move to the top of the agenda and return justice and the rule of law to their rightful place.

The work of America, America depends on paid subscribers. I hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber for $50 a year or just $5 a month. This helps sustain the journalsim of America, America, keep nearly all the content free for everyone and give you full access to the comments sections.