JaxPolitix

POST 1305

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For The Glory Of Rigging The Vote

Regular readers of these Disambiguations may recall numerous references to Paul Weyrich (here and in other posts). He’s the Republican who decades ago declared proudly and openly that he didn’t want all eligible voters to vote. He said that  if they did Republicans couldn’t win. Somehow for him and many others, that describes a conservative. You decide what it is they want to conserve.

He wasn’t the first in America to suppress the voting rights of others. Surely, the earliest dishonor belongs to White slave owners. Even after slavery was constitutionally, if not actually, abolished, Blacks were prevented from voting by means of poll taxes, rigged jelly bean counts, rigged literacy tests, by violent intimidation and by outright murder.

Even the Founders wanted only landed White men to vote. In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams famously urged her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” in the Articles of Confederation then being written. She noted that women would not hold themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation.* It was the equivalent of a “no taxation without representation” statement the Founders should have understood. John Adams ignored her appeals and women gained no voting agency. It took until 1920 for Americans to realize that women were full citizens and that they deserved the full rights attendant to that. Even so, the rich boys domination club didn’t go away.

In recent decades the effort to suppress votes has taken on some clever twists. Republicans have jiggered voting district borders to minimize representation of non-Whites, like in South Carolina, where 25% of the people are Black. There are 9 congressional districts in that state but there is only one Black representative, just 11% representation.

Elbridge Gerry, the Massachusetts governor in 1812, showed us the successfully self-serving way to manipulate district borders and was immortalized when his scheming was dubbed “gerrymandering.” He’d be so proud of today’s Republicans. Read about it at the Brennan Center.

The Supreme Court is a formidable partner in voter suppression, as most recently it green lighted states to rig elections in the Louisiana v. Callais case. That was the last blow needed to crush Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and render it powerless to protect the rights and freedom of all citizens even if they weren’t rich White guys.

Another favorite voting rights crusher is to remove polling places from where Black, Hispanic and poor people live in order to make it harder for them to vote. In Louisville, KY they removed all ballot drop boxes but two in the downtown area, making it next to impossible for rural people to hand deliver their mail ballots. That’s great for Republicans because those people would otherwise overwhelmingly vote Democratic.

Now we have Trump’s un-constitutional assault on voting by mail. Mail voting is more popular with Democratic voters than Republican voters, so putting Trump’s heel on all voting by mail would result in vote totals more favorable to Republicans. So very cunning of Trump.

Then there’s the selective removal of names from state voter rolls by means of sneaky tricks. For example, Ohio claimed to be removing the names of dead citizens from its voter rolls. They mailed an envelope mostly to voters in Black neighborhoods. The citizens were instructed to send the enclosed card back to the state within 10 days or they’d lose their voter registration. Ohio also passed a law that removed a voter if s/he missed a single federal election and the Supreme Court upheld that law. Guess what happened when scores of  those mostly poor and minority infrequent voters showed up to vote in the next election.

And there were the inordinately long lines at polling places in Black neighborhoods – as much as 12 hours on the east, mostly Black side of Cleveland, OH. Those in line to vote were entirely without a bathroom, water or food. Compare that to the maximum 2-hour wait in White neighborhoods of the same state. Well done, Ohio Republican election officials!

Here’s the simple truth. If every citizen of voting age were able to and did vote, very few Republicans would be elected. Paul Weyrich knew that and so do today’s Republicans, so they do everything possible, whether un-constitutional or illegal, to stop people from voting for Democrats. Weyrich laid out the fundamentals of the plan for domination and later generations have used their creativity to expand that, standing on the necks of voters since then.

What remains is that we as a nation are consistently influenced by Republicans to be all about rich guys, White power and domination.

The Trump Demolition Derby

You’ve long known that Trump is a walking, talking scam, fooling some of the people all of the time. Check this out.

Ted Dintersmith gets the checkered flag for his metaphor of Trump running a demolition derby. Click the graphic to see a readable version identifying some of his scams. Here’s a teaser.

After his long trail of bankruptcies, [Trump’s] fulfilling his dream of being a billionaire. In 2025, he boosted his net worth by a stunning $1.4 billion. He made off with $636 million on a memecoin [sic] while 989,000 buyers lost $3.8 billion. He’s extracted $115 million of personal gain from foreign sources. Toss in a $400 million private jet from Qatar, upgraded at taxpayer expense. All made possible by a complicit Congress and SCOTUS, cheerleaders to his destruction.

The urgent message I see in that is the last sentence:

All made possible by a complicit Congress and SCOTUS, cheerleaders to his destruction.

The complicit Congress part is what we must crush this November 3. Then we’ll be in a position for the Democrats in control of Congress starting on January 3, 2027 to do a Mitch McConnell on impending SCOTUS appointments from Trump or Vance until the the new sheriff comes to town January 20, 2029.

Best Read Of The Week

Read Morgan Freeman’s (yes, that Morgan Freeman) post, The Price of Trump. It’s a full view reminder of the bill we pay for Trump’s demolition of our democracy. Hint: However costly you think it is, it’s worse than that.

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* See especially the final two paragraphs of Abigail Adams’ letter.

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