2022 Archives

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting. While preventing people from voting has a long and sordid history in the United States (and, frankly, around the world), the modern-day Republican Party’s reliance on voter suppression as a primary tool to win elections kicked off in a big way in 1993. That was the year when 27 Democrats and one Republican cosponsored HR2, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), sometimes called the Motor Voter Act. In the House, it got 238 Democratic votes and 20 from Republicans; in the Senate, every Republican but two voted against it, while every present Democrat voted for it (Jay Rockefeller missed the vote). Several parts of the legislation freaked out the GOP, the most prominent being that it required every state to let people register to vote when they presented themselves at DMVs to apply for a new or renewed driver’s license (this part is called Article 5 of the Act).

Democrats have two months before they lose control of the House. It’s absolutely essential that they do everything possible to stop the cancer of “big money” and “dark money” in our politics. Now it’s official. Twenty-seven men choose who runs the GOP. Pundits are fond of saying, “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in America.” He’s not and hasn’t been for over a decade. Political power in this country, since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court fully legalized both overt and secret political bribery in their 2010 Citizens United decision, is now centered in the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.) They’re also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell’s attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan. After all, people are hurting. We just experienced the worst pandemic in a century, and, under Trump and Bush before him, two economic downturns unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s. Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?

Sunday book excerpt: The Hidden History of the War on Voting. Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.