Republican anti-democracy mischief has been abundant for decades. And until recently, the Voting Rights Act kept it within the boundaries of our chaotic democracy.
But a decade ago, anti-democratic mischief became cancerous, changing from a Republican war on Democrats to a Republican attack on democracy itself.
For most of the past century our nation struggled to expand rights and knocking down barriers to voting.
Republicans were full partners in the effort.
But now Republican dominated state governments across the country are enacting an array of laws that make 2012’s anti-voting efforts look feeble by comparison. With the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it’s open season on voters’ rights.
Whether their game is restricting early in-person voting and mail-in voting, eliminating same-day registration, imposing new voter registration drive regulations, demanding documentary proof of citizenship to register and vote, making it harder to restore voting rights once a citizen has been stripped of them, gerrymandering, or rendering giving a bottle of water to a thirsty voter waiting in line a crime, the excuse for these draconian laws is preventing voter fraud.
Rendering his own 2014 election victory suspect, in 2016 Greg Abbott, said "The fact is voter fraud is rampant-and in Texas, unlike some other states and unlike some other leaders, we are committed to cracking down on voter fraud."
Countless studies have disproved this canard. MIT reported “One hundred forty-three cases of fraud using mailed ballots over the course of 20 years comes out to seven to eight cases per year, nationally. It also means that across the 50 states, there has been an average of three cases per state over the 20-year span. That is just one case per state every six or seven years. We are talking about an occurrence that translates to about 0.00006 percent of total votes cast.”
Republicans are now trying to skew democracy to such an extent that if nothing is done to undo the damage, millions of eligible voters will be reduced to election spectators.
To understand how far the fruit has fallen from the tree of, some historical perspective is necessary.
For the first century of its existence, the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, emancipation, the 13th amendment, the civil war, and racial equality.
Conversely, the Democratic Party for the first half of the 20th century was the party of the Ku Klux Klan. It was packed with southern Dixiecrat racists. And one of those southern Dixiecrats became President of the United states when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
But Lyndon Johnson was no racist. In fact, LBJ strongly believed in racial equality. Because of this, his biggest battles were not with Republicans but, rather, with racists in his own party.
In a dramatic address before a joint session of Congress, Johnson called upon both chambers to enact a strong voting rights bill. In an effort to eliminate once legal strategies to prevent blacks and other minorities from voting, the administration drafted a bill intended to buttress the 15th Amendment, which removed race-based barriers to voting.
During the 1960’s more than a few Republicans championed civil rights, among them Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen and Governor George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father.
In fact, the elder Governor Romney marched with the NAACP in 1963, and even stormed out of the 1964 Republican National Convention in protest to Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act. (To be accurate, Goldwater didn’t have a bigoted bone in his body, something Martin Luther King noted when he criticized Goldwater’s dissent. In fact, he staunchly believed in equal rights for all Americans and had a strong personal history of supporting racial equality. As such, his opposition was not born of bigotry but, rather, of his belief that the part of the legislation was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, Romney could not accept Goldwater’s dissent.)
The proposed legislation to secure the right to vote for all Americans was kept alive by Johnson’s commitment to it and buttressed by the Selma to Montgomery march and the murders of Jackson, Reeb, and Liuzzo.
President Johnson sent the Act to Congress on March 17, 1965. Two months later, the Senate voted 70 to 30 to invoke closure, 3 votes more than the two-thirds vote required at the time to end filibusters.
The following day, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 19.
The chief author of the Senate version of the bill was Republican Everett Dirksen.
The House was slower to give its approval, but finally passed it on July 9. After differences between the two bills were resolved, the House passed the Conference Report on August 3, and the Senate did the following day. The vote was decisive, 328-74 in the House and 79-18 in the Senate.
After House passage, Press Secretary Bill Moyers said he had never seen President Johnson more elated. On August 6, Johnson signed it into law.
In both chambers of Congress, a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act.
The Senate Republican vote was 30-1 in favor of the bill. (The lone Republican dissenter was uber-bigot and former Democrat Strom Thurmond.)
The bill’s importance was so self-evident that even four Southern Democrats (Albert Gore, Sr., Ross Bass, George Smathers and Ralph Yarborough) voted in favor.
Johnson called it “…not only a monument to this Congress, it is a shining moment in the entire history of the United States Congress.” He was right. The Voting Rights Act remains the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.
Soon after passage, federal examiners were conducting voter registration, and black voter registration skyrocketed. The cumulative result of the Supreme Court's decisions, Congress' enactment of voting rights legislation combined with efforts by private citizens and the Justice Department was the restoration of the right to vote guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments.
That was 57 years ago, when being a Republican required a moral compass. Today, Republicans are unraveling the fabric of democracy they helped weave a half century ago. In the 2012 wave of Republican voter suppression, minority voter registration was down significantly from 2008. Among Latinos nationwide, voter registration dropped five percent; for blacks, registration rates were down seven percent.
Republicans of the 1960’s were eager to buttress democracy by fighting for every American’s right to vote.
The Republicans in 1965 would never destroy American democracy to steal elections. What would Goldwater or Reagan or Eisenhower think of Republican state politicians who still bow before Donald Trump, the most corrupt American to ever hold public office, and share his enthusiasm for undermining democracy? In 2006, George W. Bush signed the Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act. His statement is a must read for every American. (https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/07/20060727.html)
The United States has always been at the vanguard of spreading democracy throughout the world. However, for the foreseeable future the Republican Party has rendered America unworthy of exporting democracy.