While remembering the life and death of Dr. Martin Luther King, it's worth noting that Republican operatives and the Bush administration's Department of Justice have turned back the clock on civil rights. They have created a new set of Jim Crow-like policies and strategies with a still-active goal: stopping blacks, who lean Democratic, from casting ballots that count.
Have Justice Department officials and GOP loyalists become essentially an upscale, white-collar version of the Klan, armed with voting lists on their Palm Pilots rather than burning crosses and guns to keep blacks from voting?
This week, a series of articles have been published online underscoring the ways that the racist restrictions of the past have been revived, in often disturbing ways. In the Huffington Post, I reported how the FBI ignored threats to jail voters in Dallas during a hard-fought 2006 state legislative race. The Campaign Legal Center today demanded an in-depth Justice Department probe of its failure to investigate this blatant violations of civil rights.
The full story behind these sorts of vote-suppressing schemes is told in the latest issue of The American Prospect, which explores, in "The Republican War on Voting," how local, state and federal officials and GOP operatives targeted the community group ACORN with phony claims of voter fraud because of its successful voter registration drives. The claims of widespread voter fraud live on in briefs supporting the Indiana photo ID law filed by the federal government, the state and conservative Republicans now before the Supreme Court.
What was once primarily a series of tactics stretching back from the evil days of the poll tax in the 1960s to "caging" and photo ID today, has become official Justice Department policy -- either by ignoring threats to black voting rights or active steps to disenfanchise them and most other low-income minorities. Steve Rosenfeld in Social Policy looks at the full scope of vote-suppression strategies pursued by the Justice Department, pulling together a complete picture of its lawsuits, rulings and advisory actions aimed at promoting photo ID, ignoring threats to the civil rights of blacks and promoting massive purging of voter rolls.
As Project Vote noted in an overview of these articles:
Three recent articles made available online this week - including two by Art Levine and one by Steve Rosenfeld - focus on the partisan subversion of the Department of Justice and show how partisan schemes to engage in widespread voter suppression targeted one of the most active defenders of the rights of poor people and people of color. These articles have exposed what amounts to an entire war waged by conservatives against the voting rights gains of the past generation. Taken in total, the picture that emerges shows nothing less than an attempt to take America back to days of segregation and Jim Crow except this time the marauders are wearing suits and ties and carry briefcases rather than wearing white hoods and sheets and burning crosses. Even more disturbing is their willingness to subvert the non-partisan nature of the nation's top law enforcement institution, the Department of Justice and commit the resources of the Federal government to the systematic disenfranchisement of American citizens.
As my piece in the American Prospect points out:
[Attacking ACORN has been part of] the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics -- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures, ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize ?voter fraud? and limit voting access became more widespread. And attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day.
Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud. Those relatively transient voters, drawn to the polls this year by the Obama and Clinton campaigns, could find themselves thwarted in November and thereafter by the GOP-driven regime of voting restrictions -- particularly if, as many observers believe, the Court upholds Indiana's restrictive law before it adjourns this June.
Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud."
While we remember Dr. King, there's still a long way to go to achieve the voting rights he fought so hard to achieve.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U
Mike Gravel speaks for me.
if you are reading this post...please do not say anything.
if you do you will probably be accused of hating america
we all know...that every time anyone brings up this type of evil...
2 things happen.blacks are accused of victimhood...and playing the race card...
and whoever brought it up...as in reverend wrights case...is accused of being anti american,
so until the election is over...mums the word.remember...the american gubbamint is not
caging our votes. they did not murder the native americans and steal their land. they did not
enslave us and use our free labor to build this nation and its wealth. the tuskeege syphillis incident never happened...and they had nothing to do with crack and 4000 dollar machineguns suddenly appearing in american ghettos and the poorest black countries in the world. those negros made those state of the art weapons in ghetto workshops...the same way they manufactured crack cocaine in ghetto research laboratorys. they did not steal most of
mexico...from the mexicans....the mexicans willingly gave them texas...new mexico,,,california...utah...nevado...etc., for pnchos and sombreros. they did not nuke the japanese...the tonkin gulf attack did happen.never forget...the white people in america are angels sent by god and would never do the dreadful things mentioned above.and above all...please shut up about them damned chickens.
Do you really think that the requirement to have a photo ID keeps people from voting?
Do you really view blacks so lowly that you think they're all too poor to have a driver's license or other ID?
Do you really think ACORN is so innocent?
The more people see this demeaning view of blacks the more they will, hopefully, reject the real prejudice of low expectations that the Left uses so effectively to maintain the plantation attitude.
Or ... is it like we're seeing in several locations ...
The Left/Dems want to put in place a way to get the illegal alien vote! What a bunch of Marxists!
Collin
http://evangelicalperspective.blogspot.com
The voter ID is one way to test education and I suppose if one is not a tax payer one would not be likely to jump through hoops to vote.
Putting a dry-drunk, AWOL, felon in the white house was an absolute political and moral coup.
However, his time is just about done. And thankfully, he came along and won when he did. Right-wing traitors to liberity, the constitution, and human decency secretly gaining influence for the last eight years might have been impossible to stop, had they come into power now. At least now that you've shown who you are, there may still be time to fix some of the damage you've done.
I always said the best luck we ever had was that the Republican who overthrew the 2000 election was W.
Except, I no longer think it was lucky enough. The Pentagon is announcing 2009 plans.
The Pentagon and empire are not going to lose any more elections.
If there is a president who, unlike Bushie, charges the DOJ with enforcing laws, who actually does not spend their time caging voters to disenfranchise citizens who have the legal right to vote it won't happen. Ever since 2000 when Bushie's little brother sent the Florida State police to intimidate voters and hired a GOP firm to eliminate the voters in black communities it has been obvious that they are cooking the books. Firing professionals because they declined to play along with Bushies efforts to cook the books in an illegal manner is not something that has happened in the past and there is no reason to expect it in the future. UNLESS somehow a supporter of Bushies policies gets in office. Just another reason to not support any candidate with a (R) behind their name.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/appeals_court_reverses_ruling.php
“the trial court must now consider whether disenfranchising thousands of eligible citizens because of typos, is consistent with the U.S. Constitution.”
Giving them EVIDENCE does nothing to sway them. It is VERY sad!
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From what I've read, the answer would be a resounding YES.
“The Huffington Post has learned, President Bush's Justice Department hasn't brought a single prosecution or lawsuit in more than seven years on behalf of any African-American voters who faced direct voter intimidation threats and challenges -- despite receiving, by some estimates, roughly 12,000 criminal civil rights complaints of all kinds annually.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/house-panel-launches-prob_b_94263.html