Questions voter suppression push
President Trump has come out of the closet. He has explicitly revealed his unconscionable strategy for re-election. It has always been the Republican strategy, but it has heretofore been used and denied. It is a strategy perfected in the Post-Bellum South for maintaining white supremacy, but it is presumed to have withered away. Chief Justice Roberts argued in Shelby County v. Holder that the provisions in the Voters’ Rights Act were no longer necessary because we had become a post-racial, color-blind society. So, voter suppression was no longer happening.
Now comes last week’s tweet from President Trump: “fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting . . . it doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” Later, he tweeted about the Democrats: “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” There it is. Bold as brass.
Now that the President has made it open and undisguised, Republicans everywhere are saying it, too. No code words, no nudge and a wink. Georgia’s Speaker of the House has said, referring to voting by mail, “This will be extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia. This will certainly drive up turnout.”
If making America great again requires preventing as many Americans as possible from exercising their rights as Americans, what exactly are we making great?
Bill Gillmore
Columbus
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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