As GOP Presidential nominee Donald Trump prepares to finally talk to some African-american rather than just talk at them or about them from a distance claiming that Democrats have been merely pandering to them and taking their votes for granted for the last few decades It’s worth considering and reviewing exactly what has the GOP been up to during all that time.
I mean, it’s not like they were born yesterday. And neither were we.
There was a point in time when the Republican party ended slavery. There was a time a century ago when most black people were Republicans, and many black organizations such as the NAACP were founded by Republicans. There was a time when most in the KKK, and all of the whites in the deep south were Democrats.
But all that began to change as Elinore Roosevelt began to reach out to African-Americans and after Truman ordered the desegregation of the Military the southern conservative and decidedly racist Democrats split off into their own party, the Dixiecrats.
They even had their own convention and nominee for President in 1948, then South Carolina Governor Strom Thurman.
Then came Emmet Till, Rosa Parks, Medger Evers and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King followed by the Civil Rights Act which was openly opposed by then GOP Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater who had called Dr King a “demagogue.” The Voting Rights Act followed as did President Nixon’s southern strategy which ultimately absorbed the Dixiecrat voters almost entirely into the Republican party as explained by Nixon aide Kevin Phillips.
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
By passing these bills ending Jim Crow and open segregation Democrats earned the trust and support of African-Americans. The Republicans decided to go the other way, and have since been distrusted. Now Trump and the GOP argue that African-American should consider switching back, but again, what have they done in he last 50 years to earn back our trust?
Today as the first in an eight part series I examine what the GOP has done over the last few decades to support the right and ability of African-Americans to vote. Or rather, what they’ve done to systematically destroy and dismantle that right.
One thing the African-Americans gained in the sixties was protection of their right to vote under the Voting Rights act and the 24th Amendment barring the use of poll taxes.
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax
Somehow it doesn’t seem like this is a Constitutional Amendment that the GOP recognizes as legitimate since they have been going from state to state instituting “voter ID” laws that essentially force poorer voters to pay for a state ID they may not otherwise need in order to solve to false problem of in person voter fraud.
A federal judge on Monday barred North Dakota from enforcing the state’s strict voter identification-card law, adding to several recent federal court rulings that such laws may disenfranchise minority voters.
Judge Daniel L. Hovland of the United States District Court for North Dakota issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which he said had made it difficult and sometimes impossible for some Native Americans on rural reservations to cast ballots.
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Like other voter-ID laws that have been challenged, the North Dakota statute was passed by a Republican-led legislature that asserted stronger measures were needed to curb voter fraud.
When it came to the Texas version of this law which has also been blocked by a Federal Judge, the judge found that the law was specifically designed to block the vote of minorities.
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Texas’s strict voter-ID law discriminates against minority voters, and it ordered a lower court to come up with a fix for the law in time for the November elections.
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, one of the most conservative in the country, declined to strike down the law completely but said provisions must be made to allow those who lack the specific ID the law requires to be able to cast a vote.
Nine of the 15 appellate judges who heard the case generally upheld a district court’s finding that 600,000 people, disproportionately minorities, lack the specific kind of identification required — a driver’s license, military ID, passport or weapons permit, among them — and that it would be difficult for many to secure it.
These nine states have implemented voter ID laws that directly impact the ability to vote for millions, yet the actually cases of in person voter fraud are basically nil compared to other forms of fraud.
After compiling all the information into an election fraud database, News21 found that 207 cases of other types of election fraud existed for every case of voter impersonation.
"It’s difficult to study the issue of impersonation fraud, which I understood [from the News21 case analysis] to be really just allegations," said Michael McDonald, an associate professor in the department of public and international affairs at George Mason University whose electoral system research was compiled as The United States Elections Project. "Still, yes, it’s plausible and occasionally people have done it. ... But by all accounts it’s a very rare phenomenon."
The RNC has been under a consent decree order by a Federal Judge not to use Voter Caging schemes to steal people’s vote away.
In 1982, after caging in predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods, the Republican National Committee and New Jersey Republican State Committee entered into a consent decree with their Democratic party counterparts. Under that decree and its 1987 successor, the Republican party organizations agreed to allow a federal court to review proposed “ballot security” programs, including any proposed voter caging.
Those “ballot security” programs involved schemes to create list of absentee voters to challenge during an election. Even while under this decree the RNC still implemented one of these scheme during the 2004 Election in Florida and four other states by sending registered letters to the homes of African-American soldiers currently serving overseas under the logic that if they didn’t sign and respond to the letter their absentee registration could be considered fraudulent and be challenged invalidating their vote once they sent them back from overseas.
Previously undisclosed documents detail how Republican operatives, with the knowledge of several White House officials, engaged in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign in a state where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry.
The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day.
The efforts to purge voters from registration rolls was spearheaded by Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher. Griffin recently resigned from his post as interim US attorney for Little Rock Arkansas. His predecessor, Bud Cummins, was forced out to make way for Griffin.
Tim Griffen was rewarded for this by being appointed as a Arkansas Federal Prosecutor immediately following the unexplained purges of 11 other prosecutors by the Bush White House, after which ran — and won — a seat in Congress, and his since been elected Lt. Governor of Arkansas.
Since Griffin the GOP has continued their voter shenanigans of attempting to purge hundreds of thousands of Democratic — and largely minority — voters from the rolls.
Larry Harmon, a 59-year-old software engineer and Navy vet, went the polls in 2015 in his hometown of Kent, Ohio, to vote on a state ballot initiative. But poll workers told him he was no longer registered and could not vote.
“I felt embarrassed and stupid at the time,” Harmon told Reuters. “The more I think about it, the madder I am,” he said.
Harmon voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but had not returned to vote until 2015. He later learned that he was purged from the rolls in Ohio for “infrequent voting” because he had not voted in a six-year period, even though he hadn’t moved or done anything to change his registration status. The same thing is now happening to tens of thousands of voters across the state. The fear is that voters who cast ballots in 2008 but have not participated since, particularly first-time voters for Obama, will show up in 2016 to find that they are no longer registered. Ohio has purged more voters over a 5-year period than any other state.
At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, were purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a Reuters analysis by Andy Sullivan and Grant Smith. That includes 40,000 voters purged in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, where the GOP convention is taking place this week. These cities are heavily Democratic, with large minority populations, and there’s a clear partisan and racial disparity to the state’s voter purge.
In addition to suppression GOP Secretaries of State all over the country have reduced polling places in minority neighborhoods and reduced early voting which has and will create ever longer lines on election day further restricting the vote.
Thousands of voters waited in line for hours after polls closed — and winners were projected — in Arizona, after a Republican county official cut the number of polling places by 70 percent to save money.
Election officials in Maricopa County blamed higher than expected turnout, with competitive races in both the Democratic and Republican parties, and voter confusion for the massive delays, reported KNXV-TV.
Maricopa County used just 60 polling places in Tuesday’s primary election, down from more than 200 in 2012’s presidential primaries and 400 in 2008, saying demand for in-person voting has dropped as more voters mail in their ballots.
There used to be an organization that specifically helped people, particularly minorities get registered to vote. That group was called A.C.O.R.N. but it was shut down after a conservative operative connected to Breitbart falsely staged a video sting alleging that they were involved in child prostitution — for which they were sued and forced to pay $100,000 restitution to former a A.C.O.R.N. employee.
It seems that the master of the cleverly edited—if highly deceptive—video reel is now being required to pay the sum of $100,000 to Juan Carlos Vera, a one time California employee of ACORN. Mr. Vera had been portrayed by O’Keefe as being a willing participant when O’Keefe and his accomplice, Hanna Giles, proposed smuggling young women into the United States to work as prostitutes.
While Mr. Vera had no idea he was being surreptitiously video taped—which is not surprising given that California law expressly bars the secret recording of one’s voice or image—there was also something Mr. O’Keefe did not know until after he released the damaging video of his conversation with Vera for broadcast.
As soon as O’Keefe and his partner-in-crime left the ACORN location, Mr. Vera called the police to report the entire incident.
After this fake “scandal” the organization was defunded by Congress and collapsed. Although that hasn’t stopped Congress from continuing to defund them even after they no longer existed.
Amash’s amendment failed, but language to bar ACORN from receiving any money made the final cut. Section 8097 of the bill reads, “None of the funds made available under this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries.”
ACORN cannot receive any funding from the U.S. government under any legislation, of course, because ACORN does not exist. Similarly, ACORN has no subsidiaries because ACORN does not exist.
And after all this, in 2014, at the urging of Republicans, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to overturn a key section of the Voting Rights Act last June, Justice Ruth Ginsburg warned that getting rid of the measure was like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The 1965 law required that lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters get federal permission before changing voting rules. Now that the Supreme Court has invalidated this requirement, GOP lawmakers across the United States are running buck wild with new voting restrictions.
Before the Shelby County v. Holder decision came down on June 25, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required federal review of new voting rules in 15 states, most of them in the South. (In a few of these states, only specific counties or townshipswere covered.) Chief Justice John Roberts voted to gut the Voting Rights Act on the basis that "our country has changed," and that blanket federal protection wasn't needed to stop discrimination. But the country hasn't changed as much as he may think.
So in summary, this is the treatment on Voting Rights that African-Americans have received from the GOP, which is to say they’ve pretty much kept up a full court press to block black and minority people from being able to vote for the last 40 years.
And nothing about that has changed, not even with people who openly support Trump as an M.C. at one of his events described just this week that people who receive welfare and “free contraception” shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
“So if the people who paid the taxes were the only ones allowed to vote, we’d have landslide victories,” Root told Schilling. “This explains everything! People with conflict of interest shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”
“If you collect welfare, you have no right to vote. The day you get off welfare, you get your voting rights back,” he continued. “The reality is, why are you allowed to have this conflict of interest that you vote for the politician who wants to keep your welfare checks coming and your food stamps and your aid to dependent children and your free health care and your Medicaid, your Medicare and your Social Security and everything else?”
Yeah, so that happened.
It really doesn’t matter if this is motivated by partisan zeal to maximize the impact of Republican voters while decreasing the power of Democrats, or whether it’s flat out Racism — it’s completely totally fracked up. This is how the mainstream GOP has functioned and operated for decades. This is how they’ve treated African-Americans and other minorities, by using these underhanded schemes and district gerrymandering to dilute and block their vote from counting.
They’ve been shameless about it. And obvious. And now — NOW — they and Trump want to reach out a hand they’ve been slapping us with for 40 years and say, “Gee — why can’t you just give us a chance?”
Um. Hell. No.
You want our vote? Stop cynically and systematically BLOCKING our Vote, and then maybe we can talk. Possibly. The GOP has to prove they’re trust worthy, not just expect black votes when the party has a track record like this. They need to earn it the way that Democrats did, and frankly still do quite often when they fight back against this shit.
And this issue, is just the beginning of the long trail of vile bullshit the GOP has been pulling on black people for a long, long time.