Glen Contrarian
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2013
- Messages
- 17,688
- Reaction score
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- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
Now don't get me wrong - it would have been better if SCOTUS had upheld the part of the VRA that required those parts of America that had been prone to use certain tactics to defranchise minorities in the past to continue to have federal approval of any election laws. But the conservatives on the court voted in lockstep to take down this particularly crucial part of the Voting Rights Act.
And there's a very cynical part of me that's glad.
Why? Because this will only empower and embolden the racists that still infest much of the areas concerned to try to pass those same kinds of disenfranchising laws that the federal government was until today able to stop. It will give the racists - and those not-so-much-racists who just want to stop mostly-Democratic minorities from voting - the encouragement they need to go whole hog. And this will only make the circular firing squad that is the modern Republican Party that much smaller.
Why? Because as the efforts towards disenfranchisement of minorities become more widely-known (thanks to a couple little somethings called the mass media and the internet), the more people will see the modern Republican Party for what it is becoming - an ever-whiter, ever-older, and ever-more-disdainful-of-minorities country club that does not represent what America is rapidly becoming. It's going to suck for a little while, but what SCOTUS did is a lot like giving a crack addict a million dollars and telling him to spend it wisely. The crack addict will only use it to further his own destruction, and the Republican Party will use the decision of SCOTUS to go ever farther to the right, farther to the white, and farther (if not gently so) into that good political night.
And there's a very cynical part of me that's glad.
Why? Because this will only empower and embolden the racists that still infest much of the areas concerned to try to pass those same kinds of disenfranchising laws that the federal government was until today able to stop. It will give the racists - and those not-so-much-racists who just want to stop mostly-Democratic minorities from voting - the encouragement they need to go whole hog. And this will only make the circular firing squad that is the modern Republican Party that much smaller.
Why? Because as the efforts towards disenfranchisement of minorities become more widely-known (thanks to a couple little somethings called the mass media and the internet), the more people will see the modern Republican Party for what it is becoming - an ever-whiter, ever-older, and ever-more-disdainful-of-minorities country club that does not represent what America is rapidly becoming. It's going to suck for a little while, but what SCOTUS did is a lot like giving a crack addict a million dollars and telling him to spend it wisely. The crack addict will only use it to further his own destruction, and the Republican Party will use the decision of SCOTUS to go ever farther to the right, farther to the white, and farther (if not gently so) into that good political night.