Some of the new laws require voter ID, but others involve financial
penalties, like North Carolina Senate Bill
S666, which among
additional constitutionally illegal restrictions, eliminates tax deductions for
the parents of students who register to vote.
Indiana has also introduced a law aimed at banning college
students from voting.
As in North Carolina, Indiana House Bill 1311 is in direct violation
of the 1979 Supreme Court decision in Symm v. United States, which prohibits
discrimination against college student voting rights.
New barriers to voting targeted at specific groups
of people have become top priorities for Republican lawmakers in Iowa,
Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Kansas, Arizona, Texas,
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana,
Oklahoma, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota, Ohio, Nebraska, Maine, and dozens of
other states.
Why are the Republicans in these states so worried about letting
too many people vote without additional new restrictions?
The most significant motivation for voter suppression relates
to what Republicans have already done in states where they have a veto-proof monopoly
of power.
Many of the new policies solid “red state” lawmakers have
enacted are broadly unpopular among Independents, Democrats, low income groups,
seniors, students, Latinos, women, and disabled veterans. If Republicans can successfully
block access to voting among these groups, they can escape viable threats to
their reelection bids. This strategy combines election rigging with the
destabilization of representative government law.
Why Americans need to be terrified of the Radical Republican Party
Gerrymandered redistricting after the 2010 elections has made Republican
lawmakers unresponsive to public objections to their drastic new policies. With
no fear of backlash from the voting booth, the GOP has dictatorship-level
control.
Drunk with power, solid Republican legislatures have been
promoting laws that ignore or attempt to dismantle the US Constitution.
As recently as last week, the Arkansas Senate voted to
reject the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.
In the 2013-2014 session, 15 North Carolina Senate
Republicans co-sponsored House Joint Resolution 494, which attempts to establish
an official state religion.
Such a law is a direct violation of the First Amendment of the
US Constitution. The Bill of Rights states that the government shall “make no law
respecting an establishment of religion.”
Is it even possible that such a large group of elected
lawmakers do not know what’s in the Bill of Rights?
In Michigan, Republican Governor Rick Snyder, with the help
of his GOP majority state legislators, created an “emergency manager” law in
2011 that gave the governor the power to completely eliminate representative
democracy.
Emergency managers have since been used to strip cities and
towns of their democratically elected officials in places including Benton
Harbor, Detroit, and other cities. The unelected czar as unlimited
power to break contracts, sell assets, and even dissolve the entire local
government permanently if they so choose.
A month after Michigan voters rejected the emergency
manager law on the 2012 ballot, Gov. Snyder created it again and signed it
into law. This time it included a provision to prevent voters from ever putting it on the
ballot again.
If you think any of this sounds more like dictatorship than
democracy, you are correct.
By definition, a dictatorship is:
“A
form of government
in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective
constitutional limitations.
The term dictatorship comes from the Latin title dictator, which in the Roman Republic designated
a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal
with state crises.”
Add together gerrymandering, attempts to overrule the Bill of
Rights, blatant disregard for election results, plus voter suppression efforts
spreading on a frightening scale, and it is impossible to dismiss the obvious.
Republican states with majority control are carrying out an
orchestrated assault on the founding principles of American democracy, freedom,
and the documents that have bound them together for more than 250 years.
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