Voting rights update

After yesterday's positivity, not sure if this will sit well. Probably not.

The New York Times reports that the Dems have given up on a voter protection bill. Kyrsten Sinema said she opposes it. Apparently her opposition is non-negotiable. So that's the end of that. The NYT writes:

Democratic officials and activists now say they are resigned to having to spend and organize their way around the new voting restrictions — a prospect many view with hard-earned skepticism, citing the difficulty of educating masses of voters on how to comply with the new rules.

They say it would require them to compensate by spending tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars more on voter-registration and turnout programs — funds that might otherwise have gone to promoting Democratic candidates.  

Republicans, whose decades-long push to curtail voting access was put into overdrive by Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud after his defeat, are planning a renewed push to enact new restrictions during this year’s state legislative sessions.

What's next? The NYT wrote about that last December:

After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.

In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.

At present, it looks like in the 2022 and 2024 elections, the nation will get to see how effective Republican election subversion efforts will be. If they are effective enough, the Dems will not be able to control the House, Senate or White House for the foreseeable future. If so, the GOP will proudly tells us that elections have integrity. And since there is election integrity, people can relax about all that massive Democratic Party voter fraud, socialism-communism and deep state pedophilia.  

Alleged Democratic Party socialism and its deep state pedophilia will be replaced by actual Republican Party neo-fascism and its kleptocratic deep state pedophilia and fornication brigades.

But if the results of the 2022 elections do not demonstrate election integrity to Republican Party satisfaction, there will another round of election integrity laws passed. The same could happen again in 2024 if those elections are not secure enough to satisfy the Republican Party. And again in 2026 and 2028 and so on until GOP satisfaction is achieved.

Once elections are secure, then America will get to see how far and fast the Republican Party will go to establish its dream of a neo-fascist, neoliberal, White Christian nationalist state.

Decades of focused propaganda, planning and discipline have paid off for the GOP, Christian nationalism and hard core conservative neoliberalism. It will be interesting to see how Democrats respond at the state level, which seems to be the only place they can respond now.