US supreme court upholds state limits on ballot counting based
on no rational basis or evidence
“Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.” -- Radical right GOP activist J. Christian Adams speaking to GOP elites at the CNP strategy meeting in 2020
For reasons completely unclear to me, the radical right is actually starting to publicly state why it wants an authoritarian regime with minimal or no input from voters. This is as frightening as anything I can recall from the president, the GOP or wealthy supporters since January 2017.
It is not just a matter of raw, blind lust for power by the president, GOP elites and major wealthy supporters. It is also a matter of the rise of a radical ideology that has been weaponized by closed minded, self-righteous morality and the unquestionable certainty that such morality and mindset leads to.
Voter suppression - the election is illegitimate if Trump wins
The Rachael Maddow broadcast last night included a segment on the status of voting. Based on that and reporting elsewhere, several points jumped right out. First, 29 states require that mail-in ballots be received by Nov. 3 at the time the polls close. Other states set various times after Nov. 3 for a ballot to be received and counted. Thus, every single ballot that arrives on Nov. 4 or later will not be counted.
Second, the Trump administration has intentionally subverted US postal service, and because of that, as of yesterday it is too late to send in ballots by mail. One state posted a notice to voters warning them not to send their ballots by mail because they would not be received in time to count.
Third, various conservative GOP states have limited the time and/or means for voters to vote early. In Texas, without explanation or warning, the republican governor ordered the number of ballot drop sites to be limited to one per county, a ludicrous act clearly intended to suppress as many votes as possible. As discussed here, a 2013 conservative supreme court decision gutted enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in conservative states with a record of voter suppression. Since then, the affected states closed 1,688 polling places, making it harder for African Americans to vote.
In an MSNBC segment by Chris Hayes yesterday, he highlighted a very recent supreme court decision authored by the radical right justice Brett Kavanaugh that upheld state power to not count ballots that cannot all be counted by Nov. 3. Compounding that severe and unjustifiable limit on ballot counting, is a law in some states that ban preparation of mail-in ballots for counting before Nov. 3. Mail-in ballot counting requires several steps including time consuming removing of the ballots from their envelopes and checking to verify voter signatures. This is happening in the key battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Kavanaugh's nonsense justification for such state laws is a transparent voter suppression effort. In his opinion, he explained it like this: “States want to avoid the chaos and suspicions that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.” Kavanaugh cited no evidence that of any widespread impropriety in any state counting ballots after election day that indicates any rational basis for any chaos or suspicions. The Kavanaugh ‘rationale’ is nonsense built on crackpot conspiracy theory vapor, not any tangible evidence.
That same Hayes segment also pointed out this is a complete reversal of Kavanaugh's position on counting ballots after election day. A commentator observed that “before Justice Brett Kavanaugh took the position he took in that opinion, lawyer Brett Kavanaugh stood in court and argued that votes could be added to the tally as late as Thanksgiving.” That even applied to ballots that had no postmark at all and could thus have been sent after the time limits for main-in ballots. Lawyer Kavanaugh was arguing for republican Bush and against Gore in the 2000 election. Now justice Kavanaugh argues for Trump and against Biden in the 2020 election. The supreme court has fallen to the radical right and its ideology.
Conclusion: Based on the evidence so far on how some GOP-controlled states are moving to suppress votes, it is reasonable to believe that (i) millions of votes, maybe 10-15 million, will be suppressed by combined GOP suppression efforts in democratic and minority areas of GOP-controlled states, and (ii) evidence of this (the number of uncounted ballots) will also be suppressed, denied or destroyed. From that, one can reasonably conclude that (i) if the president is re-elected, he will be an illegitimate president once again, and (ii) the GOP leadership and wealthy supporters are now full-blown anti-democratic and authoritarian.
America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy --
democracy is mob rule
This is what explains the overt GOP push to suppress as many votes as they can. This is the ideology that underlies and justifies massive voter suppression. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) stated that the US is not a democracy and the word democracy does not appear in the US constitution.
“‘We’re not a democracy,’wrote Mr. Lee, 49, who is in isolation after testing positive for the coronavirus last week.
‘The word ‘democracy’ appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. That is a good thing. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few. Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that. .... Government is the official use of coercive force — nothing more and nothing less. The Constitution protects us by limiting the use of government force.’To some extent, Mr. Lee was saying out loud what many conservatives have been saying quietly for years: that redistribution of wealth through taxation or attempts to regulate business are a threat to liberty, even if they are widely popular.”
There it is. Right out in the open. America is not a democracy, and according to Mr. Lee, democrats are ‘too dangerous to rule’. In view of that, one can see why the radical right views voting by democrats and minorities as dangerous, unconstitutional mob rule.
What Lee is completely oblivious to is the fact that while he complains about widespread voting, which distributes at least a little power to voters, he claims to fear concentrated power. At present, the GOP fighting tooth and claw to concentrate power in the radical right minority, while disempowering the majority by disenfranchisement. In essence, the radical right openly accuses the left of authoritarianism, while it is clearly authoritarian.
I have argued as clearly and directly as I can that the radical right is authoritarian and profoundly anti-government, anti-democracy and anti-civil liberties. Mr. Lee’s comments now complete the picture and the ideological pieces fall into place. As I have argued before, this anti-government effort has been going on at least since the 1954 supreme court Brown v. Board of Education decision that ordered public school desegregation. That decision enraged the radical right and arguably created it as a cohesive political movement that is now in power in the US.
A last point merits comment. Mr. Lee's comments, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that”, seem to contradict my assertion that the radical right wants liberty. How can the radicals want liberty, but oppose civil liberties, e.g., voting rights, school desegregation, public schools, discrimination protections, etc., at the same time? The conflict is resolved by understanding that Lee’s conception of liberty means freedom of people to operate in unregulated, free markets. That does not include any right to vote or enjoy the protection of civil liberties. Autocrats and/or an imperial president will have the concentrated, unopposable power to insure the radical right’s vision of what liberty, peace, and prosperity are, whether citizens want it or accept it or not.
The stakes in this election are even higher than I understood as of yesterday morning. By last night, new evidence and analysis led to a more complete level of comprehension of the radical right. That is just what sometimes happens when one is pragmatic, rationalist and Bayesian when it comes to evidence and reasoning.
Questions:
What is the real authoritarian political force here, the radical right GOP and its ideology or the democratic party and its ideologies?
Who has been inclusive, the RINO-hunted-to-extinction GOP or the huge tent democratic party?
Does unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism, with its sole moral value of profit above all else, insure protection of civil liberties and the rule of law better than regulation and independent law enforcement and courts?
What is harder to corrupt and capture, state governments with a state voice or a much larger central government with competing state voices?
No comments:
Post a Comment