Where the fascist Republican Party stands on voting rights: In staunch opposition

What the aftermath of the 2020 elections in

Georgia led to in 2021: voter suppression laws, election rigging laws

and protests against those laws 

The Washington Post reports in an opinion piece on how the debate went in the House of Representatives on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. As one might expect, it was ugly. WaPo writes:

This week’s House debate on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed on a 219-to-212 party-line vote, was a reprise of past legislative wars on voting rights. It was a disgusting sight to behold.

The Lewis Act itself is straightforward. It strengthens the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against the onslaught of voter suppression measures that many states passed following the 2020 elections. It also restores enforcement mechanisms that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013.

But when the Lewis Act reached the House floor Tuesday, a host of Republicans weighed in against the measure hurling objections that were as old and as specious as arguments made by Southern lawmakers against the original Voting Rights Act.

Fifty-six years ago, faced with compelling evidence of blatant discrimination against Black voters — as well as a nationally televised attack by Alabama state troopers on the peaceful participants in a march from Selma to Montgomery that left civil rights leader John Lewis with a cracked skull — Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina argued that passing the Voting Rights Act would make Congress “the final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law," Thurmond said. “For it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency in the year of our Lord, 1965.”

Sen. Lister Hill (D-Ala.) denounced the act as a “head-on rush to the destruction of the basic rights of the individual states and the liberties of the American people to satisfy the demands, the clamor, and the expediency of the day.” He continued: “Never in my more than 40 years in Congress have I seen a measure come before this body that has had such built-in potential for the destruction of our constitutional system and the breakdown of law and order as the pending bill.”

Fast-forward to 2021.

House Democrats had compiled compelling evidence that the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act prompted states with discriminatory records, that were previously covered by the law, to enact measures that restricted voting. They had also collected data showing that Republican-led state legislatures have been passing restrictive election laws that disproportionately impacted Black and brown voters.

Confronted last Tuesday with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would help correct those wrongs, House Republicans fell back on Thurmond and Hill’s line of attack.

“If you vote for this legislation, you are voting for a federal takeover of elections,” said Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.). “You are removing the people elected at the state and local level to run elections from making decisions about how elections are run, including voter ID laws, and putting an unaccountable, unelected election czar at the DOJ, the attorney general, in charge of all election decisions in this country.”

Said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio): “This bill is not about expanding voting rights; it is about Democrats consolidating their political power. That is why they are focused on this. They are focused on consolidating their power and, I think, taking it away from the states.”

“[The Lewis bill] is a radical, unprecedented federal power grab by unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington that every conscientious American ought to oppose,” said Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“This bill would comprehensively transfer the power to govern elections in this country from the sovereign states to the federal government permanently and everywhere,” said Dan Bishop (R-N.C.).

Once again, the fascist Republican Party (FRP) relies on lies, hyperbole, irrational emotional manipulation and crackpot motivated reasoning to attack free and fair elections. As argued here before, the party has no choice but to suppress votes and rig elections. The FRP is out of step with the American public. Demographic changes have been against it for decades and the party has been acutely aware of that fact for decades. RINO hunts have left the party ideologically cleansed, intolerant and a shrinking small tent. Increasingly, it cannot win free and fair elections. It has to subvert democracy to stay in power.

In their arguments against free and fair elections, FRP House members have no choice but to (i) ignore what has happened since 2013 when the FRP Supreme Court gutted enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act[1] (or argue that never happened in effect), or (ii) claim as some do now that states have the power to run elections as they see fit and there is no actionable racial or political discrimination going on.  

FRP Senators have been mostly quite because they have political cover to say nothing. Mitch McConnell has made it clear that the John Lewis bill, is “unnecessary.” He promises it will be filibustered into oblivion in the US Senate. Saying it is unnecessary to protect free and fair elections might be about as close as FRP leadership will ever come to saying (1) there is no racial discrimination going on, and (2) there is no partisan discrimination going on against Democratic voters or candidates. All the party is trying to do is get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid.

Free election: roughly, easy voter access to voting with minimal reasonable voting requirements

Fair election: roughly, an election not subject to laws that allow the FRP to overturn the vote for partisan advantage without a valid reason(s), i.e., a rigged election 

Questions: 

1. Is the FRP merely trying to get rid of all that voter fraud that made Biden's election invalid? Or was Biden's election valid and something else is going on here, i.e., is the FRP in congress racist and/or fascist (single-party rule oriented, autocratic, etc.)? If not either, what is it? 

2. What about rank and file voters who vote for those people? 

3. How serious a threat to two-party rule and free elections does FRP opposition to free and fair elections pose, lethally serious, serious, moderate, low or trivial to nonexistent?

4. If there is no racial discrimination or opposition to free and fair elections as the congressional FRP leadership at least implies, why oppose federal laws that reinforce free and fair elections, while state FRP legislatures are passing dozens of state laws that directly attack free and fair elections?

Footnote: 

1. For context, Wikipedia says this about the 1965 Voting Rights Act: 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country. It is also "one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

As initially ratified, the United States Constitution granted each state complete discretion to determine voter qualifications for its residents. After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments were ratified and limited this discretion. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) prohibits slavery "except as a punishment for crime"; the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) grants citizenship to anyone "born or naturalized in the United States" and guarantees every person due process and equal protection rights; and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) provides that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These Amendments also empower Congress to enforce their provisions through "appropriate legislation".

To enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in the 1870s. The acts criminalized the obstruction of a citizen's voting rights and provided for federal supervision of the electoral process, including voter registration. However, in 1875 the Supreme Court struck down parts of the legislation as unconstitutional in United States v. Cruikshank and United States v. Reese. After the Reconstruction Era ended in 1877, enforcement of these laws became erratic, and in 1894, Congress repealed most of their provisions.

Southern states generally sought to disenfranchise racial minorities during and after Reconstruction. From 1868 to 1888, electoral fraud and violence throughout the South suppressed the African-American vote. From 1888 to 1908, Southern states legalized disenfranchisement by enacting Jim Crow laws; they amended their constitutions and passed legislation to impose various voting restrictions, including literacy tests, poll taxes, property-ownership requirements, moral character tests, requirements that voter registration applicants interpret particular documents, and grandfather clauses that allowed otherwise-ineligible persons to vote if their grandfathers voted (which excluded many African Americans whose grandfathers had been slaves or otherwise ineligible). During this period, the Supreme Court generally upheld efforts to discriminate against racial minorities. In Giles v. Harris (1903), the court held that regardless of the Fifteenth Amendment, the judiciary did not have the remedial power to force states to register racial minorities to vote.  

In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Supreme Court also held that Congress had the power the pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under its Enforcement Powers stemming from the Fifteenth Amendment.

From that bit of history, one can clearly see that conflicts over race and the scope of government have plagued American governance and society for a long time. Those same conflicts are still with us today.

In the pre-Jim Crow era, lynchings were more likely in the lead up to an election. This relationship disappeared once Jim Crow laws were in place. Southern politicians replaced violence to suppress black voters with laws that had the same effect. While these laws fell away following the Civil Rights Era, with the recent rolling back of much of the Voting Rights Act, there is a return to legal means for voter suppression.