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As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights Act

Glen Contrarian

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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.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Interesting. To me it just means the forced minority majority districts will be redrawn and the democrats will actually have to start running on issues other than race and class warfare.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

It should amaze me, but it doesn't that a radical leftist would view wanting fairness and accuracy in our voting system to be racist.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

It should amaze me, but it doesn't that a radical leftist would view wanting fairness and accuracy in our voting system to be racist.

If you'd read the first sentence of my post, you'd have seen that I said just the opposite. But don't let that stop you from assuming the worst of a liberal's motives on the grounds that he or she is a liberal.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Interesting. To me it just means the forced minority majority districts will be redrawn and the democrats will actually have to start running on issues other than race and class warfare.
Right, because Democrats are the ones calling poor people "jealous leeches" and saying black people need to value work over "welfare checks." LOL
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

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.

Yep, these crazy racists, trying to require someone show something as extravagant and luxurious as an ID card or driver's license. We all know black people don't have ID. Banks are racist for requiring ID for their services.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Right, because Democrats are the ones calling poor people "jealous leeches" and saying black people need to value work over "welfare checks." LOL

Well after the utter failure of the War on Poverty that makes the War on Terror look like a bargain-bin buy, a great many of them are leeches, and that you prefer they get a welfare check than work sort of proves the point you think you are nimbly swatting down. Don't worry, I am sure the other members of the pack will come in and clean up your statement for you, or more likely, try to spin the attention off your Freudian admission that democrats want to keep blacks on welfare.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Yep, these crazy racists, trying to require someone show something as extravagant and luxurious as an ID card or driver's license. We all know black people don't have ID. Banks are racist for requiring ID for their services.

I guess you never checked out any of the 31 times that the federal elections commission shot down a proposed change in the areas coveed by section 5 of the VRA...like how there would be fewer poll booths in high-density minority areas, but more in white areas. And then there's this last election when in Ohio, the Republican elections commissioner wanted to allow early voting on weekends in Republican rural areas but ban it in mostly-minority areas in the cities. And THEN there's the voter-ID laws where drivers licenses weren't good enough. AND let's not forget the times - strangely enough, only in DEMOCRATIC districts - where people had to stand in line for several hours just to cast votes...and the conservative pundits laughed about it.

AND let's not for get that felony voter fraud - as opposed to misdemeanor voter registration fraud - is quite literally rarer in America than either people getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery. It's a gigantic strawman that the right has built up to keep the poor - who are often minorities and often don't have the time or the money to go get the ID card to meet the Republicans' demand - from voting, since poor minorities strongly vote Democratic.

Here's a question, guy - should homeless people, as long as they are citizens, have a right to vote? And how do you ensure they are citizens, if they're too poor to afford a Republican-approved ID card? Are you going to make it free for them? Because otherwise, you've got a poll tax - which was shot down generations ago by the Supreme Court.

It would seem to me, Rabid, that a true American should want to get EVERYBODY to vote, instead of making harder for anyone. But let's not forget what the founder of the Heritage Foundation said in front of a conservative crowd that included a certain individual named Ronald Reagan:

"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

That was the Republican strategy then, and it is so now. Such a patriotic man, that founder of the Heritage Foundation, who wanted fewer people to vote! So much for government of the people, by the people, for the people....
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Well after the utter failure of the War on Poverty that makes the War on Terror look like a bargain-bin buy, a great many of them are leeches, and that you prefer they get a welfare check than work sort of proves the point you think you are nimbly swatting down. Don't worry, I am sure the other members of the pack will come in and clean up your statement for you, or more likely, try to spin the attention off your Freudian admission that democrats want to keep blacks on welfare.
All you did was offer a justification for the "race and class warfare" used by Republicans. It's amazing to watch people justify the very thing that they castigate others for doing.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

I guess you never checked out any of the 31 times that the federal elections commission shot down a proposed change in the areas coveed by section 5 of the VRA...like how there would be fewer poll booths in high-density minority areas, but more in white areas. And then there's this last election when in Ohio, the Republican elections commissioner wanted to allow early voting on weekends in Republican rural areas but ban it in mostly-minority areas in the cities. And THEN there's the voter-ID laws where drivers licenses weren't good enough. AND let's not forget the times - strangely enough, only in DEMOCRATIC districts - where people had to stand in line for several hours just to cast votes...and the conservative pundits laughed about it.

AND let's not for get that felony voter fraud - as opposed to misdemeanor voter registration fraud - is quite literally rarer in America than either people getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery. It's a gigantic strawman that the right has built up to keep the poor - who are often minorities and often don't have the time or the money to go get the ID card to meet the Republicans' demand - from voting, since poor minorities strongly vote Democratic.

Here's a question, guy - should homeless people, as long as they are citizens, have a right to vote? And how do you ensure they are citizens, if they're too poor to afford a Republican-approved ID card? Are you going to make it free for them? Because otherwise, you've got a poll tax - which was shot down generations ago by the Supreme Court.

It would seem to me, Rabid, that a true American should want to get EVERYBODY to vote, instead of making harder for anyone. But let's not forget what the founder of the Heritage Foundation said in front of a conservative crowd that included a certain individual named Ronald Reagan:

"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

That was the Republican strategy then, and it is so now. Such a patriotic man, that founder of the Heritage Foundation, who wanted fewer people to vote! So much for government of the people, by the people, for the people....

Now that you've built up this gigantic strawman, let me just push it over. I think people should be able to apply for a free government ID if they fall under a certain level of poverty. However, even if it's not free, I don't see how it changes anything.

It's 2013, you need an ID to do EVERYTHING. You can't get job, buy alcohol, buy cigarettes, open a bank account, DRIVE, or about a billion other things without an ID.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

I agree with the OP that the SC decision will hopefully drive minority voters to the polls with more urgency to get rid of the Republican stooges in our government (who appoint rightwing judges). Ultimately in a democracy people have to vote, and in particular vote out the knownothings who are against their interest. Clearly conservatism opposes the interest of working people and minorities, so they have to take that threat seriously and vote them out.

Hopefully, the recent revanchism of the rightwing court will motivate them to do so and overwhelm GOP efforts to disenfranchise them.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

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 when none of this disenfranchisement bull**** actually happens, I'm sure you'll be right back here to make a retraction.:roll:

Face it. You NEED racism in order to exist. Don't think that the irony of your words goes unnoticed.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

It's pretty simple, the federal cannot gerrymander districts in states using that provision anymore. We lost a district that was growing because the minority district "couldn't be touched" the last election because the decision wasn't issued at the time. The minority district lost the most people, it shrank more than any other district but could not be weened according to the facts at hand because DOJ wouldn't have signed off on it. It wasn't anything more than facts on the ground, had nothing to do with ethnicity in this day and age. So, people can bitch about the VRA provision getting tossed, but it's ridiculous in this day and age to have a long standing presumed guilt because of things that happened over 50 years ago.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

And when none of this disenfranchisement bull**** actually happens, I'm sure you'll be right back here to make a retraction.:roll: .

Only in teapartybizarroworld is the disenfranchisement of minority voters bull*****
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

It's pretty simple, the federal cannot gerrymander districts in states using that provision anymore. We lost a district that was growing because the minority district "couldn't be touched" the last election because the decision wasn't issued at the time. The minority district lost the most people, it shrank more than any other district but could not be weened according to the facts at hand because DOJ wouldn't have signed off on it. It wasn't anything more than facts on the ground, had nothing to do with ethnicity in this day and age. So, people can bitch about the VRA provision getting tossed, but it's ridiculous in this day and age to have a long standing presumed guilt because of things that happened over 50 years ago.

Kind of weird hearing conservative talk about gerrymandering as a bad thing, since the entire GOP election strategy depends on it.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Only in teapartybizarroworld is the disenfranchisement of minority voters bull*****
Who is getting disenfranchised?
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Who is getting disenfranchised?
Is this an answer to a Jeopardy category: "minority citizens in GOP dominated states"?
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Who is getting disenfranchised?

Looks like we have someone who - thanks to watching only Fox 'News' - never heard about how in this past election, voters in red-state majority-minority districts (unlike their rural counterparts) had to stand in line often for several hours just to vote...and didn't hear how the red states had often fought to have even fewer polling places in the inner cities, which would only have exacerbated the problem.

He probably didn't hear how the Republican elections commissioner in Ohio tried to outlaw early voting on weekends in majority-Democratic districts, but was going to keep early voting on weekends legal in majority-Republican districts.

Yes, Republicans really want everyone to vote, so long as it's only Republicans who get to vote....
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Is this an answer to a Jeopardy category: "minority citizens in GOP dominated states"?
Looks like we have someone who - thanks to watching only Fox 'News' - never heard about how in this past election, voters in red-state majority-minority districts (unlike their rural counterparts) had to stand in line often for several hours just to vote...and didn't hear how the red states had often fought to have even fewer polling places in the inner cities, which would only have exacerbated the problem.

He probably didn't hear how the Republican elections commissioner in Ohio tried to outlaw early voting on weekends in majority-Democratic districts, but was going to keep early voting on weekends legal in majority-Republican districts.

Yes, Republicans really want everyone to vote, so long as it's only Republicans who get to vote....
So what you two knuckleheads are really trying to say here is that as a result of this ruling people are going to be disenfranchised? Fat chance. Voter ID laws should have been passed years ago and the states are where that power should reside. What you're really pissed about here isn't the prospects of some homeless dude getting turned away at the polls, you're pissed that the Supreme Court just struck a blow on behalf of states rights. I understand how that raises the hackles of big government progressives and I love it!

And just one more thing here...
He probably didn't hear how the Republican elections commissioner in Ohio tried to outlaw early voting on weekends in majority-Democratic districts, but was going to keep early voting on weekends legal in majority-Republican districts.

This is the most gut-busting, laugh out loud distortion of Ohio I have heard to date. Do you really think that people here don't read or don't have access to factual information? Save that crap for Hannity listeners.
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Interesting. To me it just means the forced minority majority districts will be redrawn and the democrats will actually have to start running on issues other than race and class warfare.

"class warfare" lol
 
Re: As a Progressive Liberal, I Am In One Way Glad SCOTUS Defanged the Voting Rights

Interesting. To me it just means the forced minority majority districts will be redrawn and the democrats will actually have to start running on issues other than race and class warfare.

Obviously you are not paying attention as the districts have already been nicely gerrymandered such that the minority of votes wins the majority in the house.

Republicans Win Congress as Democrats Get Most Votes - Bloomberg

The effects of the ruling actually position one party to continue to win without having to address the issues. It allows the Cons to continue to ignore the needs/issues of the majority by continuing is voter suppression efforts rather than deal with the reality of changing demographics,
 
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