The Rethuglican Assault on Voting Rights

Charles P. Pierce writes an important piece again today on the New Confederate/ Rethuglican Party's frontal assault on voting rights of African-Americans. Here's a sample:

"There is no question in my mind anymore that the Republican Party has reconfigured itself as a Confederate party. Not because it is so largely white, though it is. Not because it is largely Southern, though it is that, too. And not because it fights so hard for vestigial accoutrements like the Confederate battle flag. The Republican Party is a Confederate party, I think, because that is its view of what the government of the United States should be. It is written quite clearly in the party's platform that the Republicans adopted last week in Tampa: 'The Republican party... stands for the rights of individuals, families, faith communities. institutions — and of the States which are their instruments of self-government.' [snip]

"We are not a union of states. That argument lost in Philadelphia in 1789. The Constitution is a covenant between We, the People, not We, the States. The national government is every bit the "instrument of our self-government" as any state is. Nevertheless, the Republican Party has gone full Tenther. Now a lot of it is couched in arguments against the tyranny of EPA regulations and the jackboots of the individual health-care mandate, but there is no question that the driving force of this theory of government is resistance to full African-American citizenship just the way it was in 1860, in 1879, in 1957, and in 1965. And the most obvious manifestation of that resistance today is the staggering welter of voter-suppression laws that have emerged in the years since the president was elected. Almost all of them are being defended on Tenther grounds; Texas is directly challenging the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

"(And, just in case anybody missed the point, in the same passage of its platform quoted above, the Republican Party condemned 'the current Administration's assaults on State governments in matters ranging from voter ID laws to immigration.' The "assault" in question involves the Department of Justice's entirely legal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, a law freely passed in constitutional fashion by a free Congress as the representatives of the people in 1965. This is pure Tenther gibberish, and the people who wrote the Republican platform would have flunked civics back when we still taught it.)"

He concludes with a hope that the Democratic Party will stand strongly against this hateful vision of America over which we fought a Civil War 150 years ago. A very powerful piece to be read and absorbed.