President Barack Obama isn’t pulling any punches with regard to the attempt by the Trump administration and the Republican Party to undermine the peoples’ right to vote, by sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service.
As reported by Kate Riga of TalkingPointsMemo:
When pressed on which election concern keeps him up at night, former President Barack Obama quickly identified the Trump administration’s attack on the postal service.
“What we’ve never seen before is a President say ‘I’m gonna actively kneecap the postal service to discourage voting, and I’m gonna be explicit about the reason I’m doing it,'” Obama told his former campaign manager David Plouffe on the latter’s podcast “Campaign HQ.”
It’s impossible to recount the number of Americans who have shed their blood on domestic and foreign soil simply to preserve the simple right of their fellow citizens to vote. The franchise is the whole point of the American experiment. Without the right to vote freely, there is no America.
Apparently, our last real President agrees:
“The question is not what the Democrats should be doing, it’s what are the Republicans doing that you are so scared of people voting that you are now willing to undermine the basic infrastructure of American life,” Obama said. “It’s the equivalent of saying we’re not gonna repair highways because people might drive to the polling places — so we’ll just let massive sinkholes in the middle of the interstate linger because people may use those roads to vote.”
We as Democrats have—to our detriment-- allowed the Overton Window to be moved on our collective outrage towards the GOP’s voter suppression tactics, including these blatantly obvious ones by the current administration. We have been conditioned, by decades of numbing, repeated exposure, to almost tolerate through grim expectancy what should always be decried as absolutely intolerable and un-American in our society, simply by the routine, seeming pervasiveness, of its practice.
Fundamentally, distilled to its essence, voter suppression is the equivalent of making war on the American people. There can be no greater crime against the country we aspire to, than trying to take away the people’s right to vote. Such tactics should be viewed through the same lens for which we view the crime of Treason, with consequences for the perpetrators tailored accordingly, to match the gravity of the crime.
Hopefully enough Americans will wake up to that reality before it’s too late.
