There’s a lot to digest on today’s BradCast, so I’ll try to keep this teaser brief so you can just listen. [Audio link to show is posted below summary.]
First up, it turns out lawyers really don’t like Donald Trump, even the ones he actually pays millions to work for him. In Congress, Dems vow “no more business as usual” on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, but how much are they actually able to do about it? We may be about to find out.
And, as if it wasn’t difficult enough to vote safely — or at all — in Texas amid the pandemic (or even before the pandemic!), still more vote suppression has just been ordered there by the radical rightwing judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal.
A ruling like the one they’ve just issued to allow mail-in ballots to be rejected based on perceived signature mismatches (as adjudicated by non-handwriting experts) without contacting voters first to allow them to cure any perceived problems, is the type of voter suppression that might have been blocked in advance by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act before it was gutted by the GOP-majority U.S. Supreme Court in 2013, in the infamous Shelby County case.
That ruling of a piece of with Karl Rove and the GOP’s “Plot for Permanent Minority Rule”, as expertly detailed by our guest today, author and FairVote.org Senior Fellow DAVID DALEY in his new must-read cover story for The New Republic this month. Daley unspools the full story of how the unlikely Republican voting rights hero, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), partnered with Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and voting rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in 2006 to ensure the re-authorization of the VRA in full for 25 more years. Sensenbrenner held a dozen hearings with nearly 50 witnesses as Chair of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, in order to compile some 12,000 pages of recent, compelling evidence of racially-based voter suppression that supported the need to extend the then 40-year old landmark civil rights law.
But that was before Karl Rove’s successful scheme to gain GOP control of state legislatures in 2010 after that year’s Census, in order to gerrymander “democracy” within an inch of its life for the entire next decade. And it was before the Republican SCOTUS majority ignored Sensenbrenner’s work on the VRA entirely — and a bipartisan 98-0 vote in the U.S. Senate to extend the Act — in order to gut it.
The nation has been paying a very steep price ever since. Republicans in gerrymandered districts in Congress and state legislatures no longer worry about working and compromising with Democrats. Their only concern became primary challenges from the Right. So the party moved ever farther in that direction until arriving where we are today, when the idea of fixing the now-gutted VRA has become unthinkable — just a few short years after it was re-authorized by a Republican House, Senate and President. The scheme also allowed opportunists like Donald Trump to take advantage of the lost protections for voting rights in gerrymandered state after gerrymandered state, which continues to haunt America’s hobbled democracy today.
Daley discusses how all of this came about, how — and if — it can be corrected, and how he was able to get so many Republicans who now regret building the “Frankenstein monster that has devoured our politics” to speak on the record about those regrets — as regular Americans pay an unspeakable price for it all.
“This was not caused by Donald Trump. It did not start with him,” Daley tells me. “The fight over the vote has been deeply entwined in this nation ever since the founding of this nation. But these battles did not start in 2016. They will not end on Election Day 2020. And there is a real, deeply embedded, [GOP] minority rule that has been built atop a system that already advantaged Republicans geographically in the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College.”
“This has been baked in to our politics for a long time. It’s going to take a lot of time for us to get it out. This is a Census year. This is a redistricting year. So state legislatures and the next decade of maps are on the line again,” he cautions. So, please VOTE and remember to vote ALL THE WAY DOWN THE BALLOT THIS YEAR! “There are more of us than there are of them,” Daley notes, “but there are more of them on the Supreme Court than us, and that’s a big, big problem.”
And if that sounds like a heavy show, don’t worry! Mel Brooks is here at the end to help calm your anxiety — and mine — just a little bit…
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