“People in the Republican Party feel very comfortable disenfranchising people, throwing out their votes. Anyone who thinks the opposite has been purged from the Republican Party.”
That’s former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal talking.
Such a statement would sound over the top if not coming from one of the nation’s leading legal minds.
Are Republicans as a body in favor of yanking people’s cherished ballots out of their hands?
Hell, yes.
Republicans long have made voter suppression their cause, a practice that has accelerated to hyper speed under Donald Trump.
And today’s efforts are all based on utter bogus-ity: the Big Lie about the 2020 election and way-beyond-dubious claims about widespread illegal voting.
The latter is nothing new, of course. Republicans for years have used the made-up issue of illegal voting to gain partisan advantage.
As the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice puts it, assertions of widespread illegal voting, particularly the smelly red herring of undocumented workers doing it to swing elections, is a “solution in search of a problem.”
The real objective of the spiel is to justify policies to tamp down the participation of the poor and people of color who might be inclined to vote for Democrats. More than one judge has blasted so-called “ballot security” laws as race-driven in intent and application.
As have been most of the claims underpinning the Big Lie.
This crime against democracy, all built on lies, takes many forms.
Look at what Trump and Co. did in 2020 in their conspiracy to toss out the votes of entire states so he could stay in power.
In each of six battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia – the Republican Party went to extremes to have the results thrown out. Almost invariably Trump’s claims of fraud carried the strong and highly offensive implication that people of color cheat in counting votes. You know — in Detroit, in Philly, in Atlanta, in Phoenix.
I look at polls and wonder how in the world a convicted felon and fraudster, the man behind the “fake electors” plot, is still in the game in these swing states –- the very electorates he sought to screw.
Many voters in those states clearly don’t know or understand what he sought to do.
No one pleads “election interference” more loudly and often as Trump, and no one in American history has been so devoted to pulling it off — indeed, criminally so.
If there is such a thing as “justice for all,” Trump will go to prison for that — the gravest crime any president ever committed.
But if you think, as shrugged off by J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson and other tools of Trump, that such concerns are matters of the misty past, look again.
In front after front, Republicans are fighting right now to (1) suppress the vote; (2) gum up the works if Trump loses again with designs to negate the will of the people.
Consider Republican lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina challenging the legitimacy of overseas ballots.
Only desperate and conniving partisans would even ponder this tack.
The Washington Post reports large numbers of veterans and active-duty armed forces have contacted Congress, concerned their votes won’t count.
Yeah, stick it to those “suckers” in the military. Smart politics, Trumpies.
In Arizona, snarling Trump attack dog Stephen Miller has filed a suit to empower judges to throw out election results.
In Pennsylvania, where Democrats have fought a ruling that could discard mail-in votes without dates, Republicans are challenging a court ruling ordering a county to notify voters who are affected in this way so they could cast provisional ballots.
And there’s the Republican last-grasp notion that should Trump lose by a slim margin the GOP could somehow get the House to nullify the will of the majority. Unconscionable — like Trump himself.
Vote early. Take care to get it right. Get out ahead of these con artists who again seek to install a serial liar and criminal in the White House.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
