Friday, May 12, 2017

Vote Suppression Goes National

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald John Trump, the man who claimed an historic landslide last November, never mind the fact that his opponent received three million more votes than he did, has been smarting over those pesky vote totals for months now.  A loss by any measure is difficult for someone with an ego the size of the Goodyear blimp to handle.  Donald John quickly decided that he lost the popular vote due to fraudulent votes cast for Hillary Clinton.  It was a convenient falsehood that not only painted the Democrats as crooks, but took a nice little sideswipe at immigrants as well - the people seen by Trump's yeehaws as the ones most likely to have cast those illegal votes.  It was a twofer!

Yesterday, in a move to address the imaginary issue of voter fraud (and to take the focus off of the current swirl of news around Trump's firing of the FBI Director), Donald John announced that he was setting up a "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity," to counteract all of that massive voter fraud that had tainted what should have been his huge victory last fall.

Republican state legislatures around the country have been focused on"voter fraud" over the past several election cycles (when they weren't focused on gerrymandering), though their actual intent was not to lessen voter fraud, a phenomenon so rare as to be virtually non-existent, but rather to suppress the votes of the poor, those likely to be living more transitory lifestyles, and the elderly who sometimes experience difficulty in coming up with original documents like birth certificates.    This shameless manipulation of the voting rules was designed for one purpose only - to keep people from exercising their Constitutional right to vote.

Now Donald John wants to drag this electoral sleight-of-hand onto the national stage, to take the hillbilly hokum propagated by (predominantly white and male) used car dealers, insurance salesmen, and farmers in rural legislatures and give it a federal stamp of approval.   To direct this monument to fake news, Trump has chosen a master vote-manipulator and immigrant-basher, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Kobach is not only the author of Arizona's odious SB 1070, the "show me your papers" law, he has also helped to write voter identification (suppression) laws in a number of other states as well.  Kobach is well steeped in the lie of voter fraud, and now he will have a national platform from which to entertain and incite the gullible.

How fortunate we are to live in a country where our politicians work so diligently to restrain our involvement in the workings of their government.


2 comments:

Xobekim said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Xobekim said...

Krazy Kris Kobach’s reminds me of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha on a noble but illusory quest. Don Quixote’s heart was smitten by the young woman he called Dulcinea, a name depicting sweetness. Of course she is, depending on the adaptation of Cervantes’s work either the daughter of an inn keeper, a prostitute, a farm girl, or some combination of those classifications.

Kobach seeks the purity of the lovely Princess Dulcinea but ends up with a lesser grade of lady. Case in point is one of an elderly man who claims Western Kansas as his residence. The old codger in facts owns a home in Virginia. The geezer’s claim to residence is that he rents a barcalounger, a comfortable reclining chair, from a friend when he is in Kansas.

You’d think Kobach would have the old fart in his sights, charged, and prosecuted for posing as a resident when by all appearances he is just an itinerant who occasionally is found in Kansas. Kobach did not charge the man with voter fraud. Instead of seeing his lovely, pure, and chaste Dulcinea in a tawdry light Kobach convened a commission to not only clear the man’s name and confirm his residence, but also to let him file again to run for the United States Senate.

And that’s why Pat Roberts continues to represent the Military Industrial Complex, the Koch Brothers, and all other highest bidders for his vote in the name of the people of Kansas.

We should watch Kobach as a dark comedy as the federal courts will have more opportunities than ever before to declare his statutes unconstitutional and his edicts stemming from this commission arbitrary and capricious.

Joust at those mind monster windmills of yours Kris. Joust!