GOP's Putinesque Attack on Democracy

"Smells Familiar"

They refer to the Constitution when it suits their purposes, but the current Republican politicians (and that includes the Republican justices on the Supreme Court) are attempting to dismantle our democracy. And make no mistake about it; theirs is an all-out, extremely well financed assault. They are attacking in local and national media outlets, city governments, state legislatures and courts, federal agencies, the House of Representatives, the US Senate and federal courts.

As our country was being created, the founding fathers were careful to protect a minority from being steamrolled by the majority, but back then they did not foresee a corporate-financed minority party attempting to abuse those precautions. Quite frankly they probably could not imagine future Americans attempting to curtail the basic tenets of democracy. True, the founding fathers made compromises to create a new independent,democratic United States, but in the first sentence of the Constitution, they laid out lofty principles to guide us through the years ahead. Unfortunately, most current Republicans have ignored that first, most important sentence. They get the part about providing "for the common defense," but few remember the very next phrase, "promote the general Welfare." As  my good friend, Buck, has said: "When they read that phrase, they interpret 'general Welfare' to mean General Electric and General Motors."

The most obvious Republican attacks on democracy are their blatant attempts to suppress the vote. One would think that the more people who participate in the voting process, the better the democracy. Apparently the GOP has decided that as a minority party representing some specific vested interests, they cannot win if democracy is all inclusive. In a moment of honesty, Mitt Romney admitted as much when in the 2012 election he made his famous 47% remark.

In that 2012 presidential election, Republican governors and legislatures tried to cut down the number of days set aside for early voting, reduce the number of Saturdays and Sundays available in order to keep people working two jobs or long hours from voting, require IDs that poor and elderly citizens do not have. and intimidate Latino voters.

And there is no question that these maneuvers were designed to skew the election in the GOP's favor. In Pennsylvania, the Republican House Majority leader, Mike Turzai,  admitted that the voter ID "is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania...."

And then SCOTUS chief justice John Roberts and and his fellow Republicans on the court threw out Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, "which subjected the voting laws in states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to Justice Department scrutiny..."(Dionne). Republican politicians in these states were giddy with the possibilities that this decision offered them.

Shortly thereafter, the most egregious attack on voter rights occurred in North Carolina where the Republicans are passing a laundry list of voter suppression measures that Vladimir Putin would be proud of.

In addition to prohibiting the use of student IDs as a recognized form of identification -- an attempt to keep college students from voting, they have added the following:

• The end of pre-registration for 16 & 17 year olds
• A ban on paid voter registration drives
• Elimination of same day voter registration
• A provision allowing voters to be challenged by any registered voter of the county in which they vote rather than just their precinct
• A week sliced off Early Voting
• Elimination of straight party ticket voting
• A provision making the state’s presidential primary date a function of the primary date in South Carolina
• A provision calling for a study (rather than a mandate) of electronic candidate filing
• An increase in the maximum campaign contribution to $5,000 (the limit will continue to increase every two years with the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• A provision weakening disclosure requirements for "independent expenditure” committees
• Authorization of vigilante poll observers, lots of them, with expanded range of interference
• An expansion of the scope of who may examine registration records and challenge voters
• A repeal of out-of-precinct voting
• A repeal of the current mandate for high-school registration drives
• Elimination of flexibility in opening early voting sites at different hours within a county
• A provision making it more difficult to add satellite polling sites for the elderly or voters with disabilities
• New limits on who can assist a voter adjudicated to be incompetent by court
• The repeal of three public financing programs
• The repeal of disclosure requirements under “candidate specific communications.”

Not only are such laws an affront to our democratic principles, it smacks of racism. These voter restrictions remind one of what segregationist Southern lawmakers did in the past, and now the Roberts' Supreme Court has given current Republican lawmakers the go-ahead.

It's not just a matter of voting rights. The GOP positions on a variety of issues follows the same anti-democratic path: immigration issues, student loans, the corporatization of the media, and breaching the separation of church and state.

It is no surprise that many throughout the world disregard our calls for democracy and equal rights. We have a major political party doing their best to restrict democracy and limit equal rights here at home.