There is no more sacred, more fundamental institution of American civilization than the right of the people to decide the composition of our government and laws. Citizens for over two centuries have given of their labor and income, accepted the social costs of standing up for what's right when their neighbors have been wrong, risked the violence of corrupt interests and terrorist mobs who would deny their rights, watched their sons (and more recently, daughters) march off to war, and sometimes sacrificed their lives, not for a flag, not for a uniform, and certainly not to profit from it monetarily - but for the simple right to be masters of their own lives and equal partners in their own country. So understand this is not hyperbole: Conspiring to suppress the right of other citizens to vote in order to impose your preferred government upon them is treason - the act of an enemy, no different in its aims than an invading foreign army.
First, let me be clear for the sticklers and scholars: I'm not arguing that such an act fits the stringent legal criteria for a charge of treason as encoded in our Constitution - the term as classically defined has only applied to switching allegiances in war, while the more precise (but now largely archaic and irrelevant) term for being an internal enemy of your own republic was "sedition." I note this information to head off objections, but such semantic quibbling hides from the point: Whether someone is acting as an agent of a foreign government that wants to take away our most basic freedom or on behalf of their own desire to do so, once their actions rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy they...are...traitors, whether or not they're indictable as such.
When I listen to people talk about the alleged actions of Colin Small - the RNC employee accused of destroying voter registration forms - as if they were merely just another example of "dirty tricks," it is infuriating. Small himself is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but let's be totally clear about the nature of the charges: He is accused of taking steps to rig an election by sabotaging people's attempts to register - in other words, to impose his will on the American republic and deny others the most basic freedom of choice and self-governance. He sought to impose a government on the American people they do not consent to, and the Republican Party as a whole has racked up a truly staggering record of taking such actions in the past few years, even compared to their historical habits since Richard Nixon. If that is indeed what occurred, then Small is a traitor, and so is everyone else in his Party who in any way knowingly participated in, encouraged, or tolerated such actions.
There's a reason that people who sell secrets to enemies or switch sides in war are hated throughout society, and it's not merely out of loyalty to the military or some childish "us vs. them" team sport psychology - it's because people recognize that it is their liberty that has been sold out for someone else's selfish financial desires or ideological ambitions. The reason we have Armed Forces in the first place is to stop other military powers from doing what Small is accused of attempting to do and what his Party continually does: Taking away the freedom of the American people to self-govern.
Stopping that from happening is so eminently necessary that we let the Pentagon get away with virtually anything so long as it makes even the most half-assed attempt to defend us as it claims - we feed unbelievable amounts of money down a black hole, tolerate constant lawbreaking and human rights abuses, and have militaristic messages crammed down our throats, all because it's better than being a slave to those exact same kind of people from another country. But what about being a slave to people inside this country whose values and attitudes are foreign, who have zero respect for democracy or humanity, and know only their own insatiable lust to rule others?
There are far fewer resources devoted to fighting that. In fact, effectively none. Colin Small was only arrested because there was a sharp-eyed witness who saw the act, looked at the registration forms, and called the cops. How many others of his ilk are getting away with it because they're not dumb enough to throw away the forms in a strip mall dumpster? Given the behavior of the GOP leadership, it's doubtful that this kind of thing is unusual among the fanatical foot soldiers driven by Obama Derangement to unprecedented heights of criminal psychosis. Police forces throughout the country on every level spend most of their budgets chasing after victimless crimes - people who dare to possess or God forbid sell a prohibited substance - and on the rare occasions they act in a politically relevant capacity it's more often to spy on, violently assault, and illegally arrest people for exercising their rights than to go after people trying to suppress those rights.
And now that this one rare instance has occurred where the justice system protects our liberty against Republican criminals, let's be realistic about what will follow: If convicted, Small would likely face far more lenient consequences than say, someone who grows marijuana, and will probably be considered a hero among his comrades. There is also a strong likelihood of corrupt Republican judges at some point in the appeals process drastically reducing any given sentence greater than a slap on the wrist. Frankly, given the history and ongoing degeneration of Republican politics into naked criminality, the likelihood is that he has a bright future in the GOP, perhaps some day even being nominated for federal office if they decide it's worth buying him a cleaner record. About the only thing that Republicans will ever hold against this man is that he got caught.
As far as I'm concerned, any criminal tactic designed to sabotage the electoral process - deliberately spreading disinformation about the date of an election or the laws and procedures surrounding it, trashing registration forms, purging voter rolls of minority-sounding names, whatever - is a felony of the highest order, and organized conspiracies to commit these tactics call for the same 20-to-life sentences as RICO and drug trafficking: Same as if they'd marginally increased the potential future danger to democracy by feeding secrets to an oppressive foreign enemy who might or might not some day act on their hostile intentions. But don't tell me someone who tries to rig elections should be treated more leniently than Bradley Manning is for "betraying" his superiors to the American people.
But I'm not saying anything controversial or particularly insightful - the Republican Party has committed far more overt acts of treason in the past decade than merely throwing away voter registration forms, and everyone not suffering from self-induced amnesia for the sake of their ability to sleep remembers every single one of them. The overthrow of the 2000 "election," the post-9/11 torture camps, issuing terror alerts to silence criticism and distract attention from scandals, invading Iraq, using every national disaster as an opportunity to rob the country blind, falsifying and destroying government documents to cover up their crimes and embarrassments, holding the national economy hostage to get tax-cut payoffs and create their own political issues at America's expense, etc. etc. It's as if our enemies from WW2 have been reincarnated in a smarmier, more cowardly form to get revenge by eating away at us from within.
This is not politics the GOP is waging, it's war - they are at war with the United States of America, right down to its very foundations. Whatever fantasy of medieval tyranny and degradation floats around their heads when they imagine the "true" America they want to impose, it has nothing to do with this country - and with every year that passes, they become more violently enraged about that fact, and more determined to punish us all for it. Democracy is totally incompatible with their vision for America, and they have no intention of permitting it to continue or being law-abiding participants in elections while it does. They want power, and they will take it by hook or by crook if you won't consent to their having it. That is why acts of treason are not merely outliers or deviations from Republican politics, but are its purest expression and harbinger.
Expect the Small affair to seem like a quaint little childhood prank compared to the things we haven't heard about, and the shit they'll almost certainly try to pull on Election Day. These people don't even want Election Day to happen, and they're going to act accordingly when it does.