The GOP’s New Voting Laws. “Leveling The Playing Field” Through The Looking Glass

Back in the 80’s corporate America was in a frenzy of greed gluttony. Reaganomics was just kicking into high gear, regulations were being cut, and it a gilded age.

But there was one non related group of companies where the CEO’s got carried away. Their secret to a phone number bonus was to at all times maximize shareholder profits. Even with record profits, they set up teams to scour the operation for waste, and to slash it. Which worked great, until the next recession, when they ended up with egg all over their faces for leaving no fat left to trim to save money.

This directly bears on the subject. Because if you are a Floridian for fair voting,  or a Georgia voting rights peach!, or a Texas voting rights straight shooter, or even an Arizona voting rights watchdog, you walked into your office the day after your Governor signed a new restrictive voting law, or will sign a new voter restriction law, hang up your jacket, sit down at your desk, sigh, and say Just another day at the office.

Because this is nothing new with the GOP. Because the GOP has spent well over a decade watching it’s white numerical superiority at the ballot box slip away from them, and even though they still had the wonders of gerrymandering to tide them over, like those long ago corporate CEO’s, they spent those years trimming off all of the voting fat, and making it as difficult as possible to vote.

Just like the robber Barons of yore, or at least the 1980’s found themselves needing to make changes, with no fat left to cut, so is the GOP in the same Pandora’s Box. The great Covid pandemic of 2020 forced states normally happy to have the smallest turnouts possible to change their voting rules, in order to at least assure that enough of their voters turned out to vote, But those pesky minorities took advantage of the situation, and made life miserable for God Fearing GOP voters by voting by mail!

So, even in states like Georgia and Florida, where mail in balloting has been a traditional GOP secret weapon, now that the cat is out of the bag, they have to change it, o that minorities can’t use it. But you can’t just write a law that says Black and Spanish speaking people are barred from using vote by mail. They have to make any new restrictions equitable, which in Florida means pissing off, and possibly turning off, Senior and military GOP voters who will now have to jump through hoops on order to get mail in ballots.

If you’re a voting rights activist, this is your 9-5 job. You read through these laws, determine how to follow the rules, do everything in your power to help your constituents navigate those min e fields, get them registered to vote, and motivate them to get to the polls.

Likewise, if you’re a minority voter, this is nothing more or less than the Same. Old. Shit. Does the word Selma mean anything? I don’t know, maybe The Edmond Pettis Bridge? The African Americans have spent the last 70 years jumping through hoops, following whatever new roadblocks were put in front of their way, and finding a way to get around it and still manage to get their vote counted. For American minorities, this is a hard earned right, and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

But what about the other side of the ledger? You know, basic, decent, God fearing, of GOP voters? Don’t even ask. They have never had to fight, march, bleed, or die for their voting rights! Now you want them to actually provide proof as to who they are?

I’m 64 years old. Let’s just say that I currently residing in The Villages, an uber GOP enclave of old well off shitpokes in Florida. Let me insert myself;

OK, let me get this straight. I’ve been voting absentee by mail for years now, but now all of a sudden, I gotta go running all over the house, looking for an approved form of state ID, like I’d know what that is, and then I gotta take it to the service desk at Smiths or whatever to get a copy made, so I can prove I’m really me, when I return my mail in ballot, which I also have to request all over from scratch again this year  Are you fucking kidding me?!?

This is exactly what I was talking about when I spoke of equality through the looking glass. Because minorities in this country have spent their entire lives having to jump through hoops, and count beans in order to cast a vote. But now, because the GOP spent years paring away at minorities rights to vote, even when they didn’t need to, now find no way to curtail voting rights without having to inconvenience their own voters.

Somehow or other, I just don’t see this ending well with the GOP trying to explain to their own voters why they suddenly need to jump  through hoops to do something that they’ve always taken for granted. GOP voters are by nature lazy, after all, their party has made it almost insanely easy to vote. And if it comes down to a surge of decades long downtrodden minorities to the polls, and lazy GOP voters being asked to go through a couple of extra extra steps, I already know where my money is. Don’t touch that dial.

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