Ross Douthat actually seems to understand that efforts to suppress the black vote in 2012 backfired and caused higher black turnout. He also understands that future efforts to suppress black turnout will fail to fix the Republicans’ structural problems. I don’t think he is justified in arguing that the Democrats got a “gift” from the Supreme Court when they gutted the Voting Rights Act, however. All that ruling does is make it easier to do voter suppression efforts. In most cases, such efforts can now only be combatted after the fact. Suppressing votes is suppressing votes, even if the overall effect is to increase black turnout and make it more uniformly supportive of the Democratic Party.
What Douthat’s argument amounts to is a concession that Republicans will not be able to help themselves from pursuing Jim Crow policies, but that their efforts will do more harm to their long-term prospects than actually trying to vie for minority votes would do. I can’t argue with that.
I think many of us came to the same conclusion about long term effects for Dems.
But I don’t think anyone has a handle on how much short term damage could be caused. And since we’re talking about districting as well as voter id, it could be substantial.
Also Donut is on drugs when he writes this:
Where IS all this massive voter fraud that we need protection from?
It’s not very strong, however. “Potentially” legitimate isn’t a ringing endorsement.
Sure, not a ringing endorsement. But why write about voter ID if you can’t manage one sentence about whether “voter fraud” is real or not? This has been public knowledge for years. Instead, he let’s the lie get by.
To my “ears” it’s an obfuscation whether due to laziness, ignorance or bigotry. (I’m in a charitable mood.)
When people obscure motives about adopting voter ID by claiming voter fraud or implicitly agreeing with those claims, it reminds me of Lee Atwater’s comments on the southern strategy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Atwater_on_the_Southern_Strategy
I believe Douthat’s point was that Voter ID laws have a fig-leaf of validity, they are ostensibly about voter fraud, whereas Jim Crow laws literally said that Blacks can’t vote. He’s not arguing the validity of voter id laws, he’s implicitly acknowledging that they are substantively the same as Jim Crow laws. In other words, he’s saying it’s the difference between saying, “She’s a witch!” and saying, “She’s just mad because someone dropped a house on her sister…” – substantively the same but different in their delivery.
Just 2 last thoughts…
1) If Donut had written this: “Voter ID laws have a fig-leaf of validity, they are ostensibly about voter fraud, whereas Jim Crow laws literally said that Blacks can’t vote.”
It would have made more sense. But he didn’t write that. Why couldn’t he bring himself to say that more directly rather than his ambiguous language? IMHO, He has NO clear sentence on whether or not claims of voter fraud are legit. Let a lie go unchallenged, the lie lives on. At best he expressed himself very poorly.
2) And when he writes stuff like this:
“voter identification laws do not belong to the same moral or legal universe as Jim Crow.”
I have a hard time interpreting that as:
“he’s implicitly acknowledging that they are substantively the same as Jim Crow laws.”
He’s a Republican. If he said forthrightly that the Republicans are a bunch of racist mofos who want to disenfranchise Blacks just like the Klan of the Old South then he’s be a former Republican.
Hence the circumlocution.
I give Douthat credit for even obliquely acknowledging the truth.
agree, also like your example
Great analogy!
The voter suppression efforts may have motivated higher voter turnout (I do think black turnout was always going to be really high) and it also caused hundreds of thousands of lost votes because people couldn’t wait in 8 hour lines.
The estimates are 200,000 votes in Florida alone.
Republicans’ long term prospects are already grim without the opening that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the VRA provides. The problem is that we really do need a short term win in state and federal races. The stakes are really high for the 2014 election.
As Eugene Robinson wrote, “We’re all uppity now.”
Well yes, when you take away people’s rights, they do tend to resist. So now the Republicans are openly targeting black voters at the same time they’re trying to keep the number of Latino voters to a minimum. With all this talk of how they should just focus on white voters, they seem determined to turn the 2014 election into a referendum on their own bigotry.
It could get ugly, but the louder that election gets, the better the Democrats’ chances of taking the House.
The question is, though, can the Dems attach the court’s decision to the Reps, or will the Reps get by with $million ad campaigns about how the nonpartisan court was just interpreting the Constitution and “don’t look at us”.
The only ones who would likely be influenced by that argument wouldn’t be voting Dem anyway.
Bingo. I have seen no effort or attempt by any Dem to connect the (now numerous) anti-democratic rulings by Roberts Repubs to the Repub party and the “conservative” movement. Of course, the fine corporate media will NEVER indicate that the VRA was gutted ENTIRELY by Repub “justices”.
Obama should deliver a major speech before the 2014 election connecting all the dots of the partisan Roberts Court to the “conservative” movement, its vote suppression strategy, and how Repubs alone benefit from EVERY ruling by Roberts Repubs. The speech should explain the political history of the justices and how they voted in their series of anti-democratic rulings which began with Bush v Gore. It would be unprecedented, and Repubs would be apoplectic with fury. That alone might force the corporate media to cover it. Dem Congressional officeholders could then play off Obama’s speech. The rhetoric desperately needs to be raised to match the reality.
A dream world, of course. And “risky”! (As though Dems have any hope of retaking the House without some clear message…) But the American Fascist movement depends on spades not being called spades…as do Roberts Repubs.
It’s really too early to know the outcome. The Citizens United ruling was intended, obviously, to give the GOP the 2012 election through massive election spending. It didn’t work that way – it turns out that there is a media saturation point for elections and any spending past that point adds no value. In fact, the oversaturation tends to push people to social media, which as of yet is too decentralized for rich conservatives to control that message.
So, the SCOTUS ruling ignoring the 15th amendment is intended to give localities free reign in creating election rules that favor the GOP – with the idea that injured parties can sue after the fact. I know that a lot of Democrats this think will just motivate minorities even more – but like with the saturation advertising there are limits to just how motivated voting groups can get. Both Black and Latino voters set records in 2012 – don’t forget that in Latino areas the mainstream polling consistently understated participation that the Latino polling organizations predicted (also in 2010 – saving Harry Reid’s butt among others). Colorado was generally predicted to be 1-2% for Obama but ended up almost 6% – the difference was the underforecast Latino vote. So, yes, they may be more motivated, but we are already not far from the limit of possible turnout.
Now, let’s look at what the VRA ruling actually does for the GOP. Wisconsin is a starting point – voter ID laws combined with laws making it expensive to get a non-driving voter ID.
But I suspect that’s only the tip of the iceberg. I noticed doing voter protection duty last fall that poor folks are disproportionally more likely to have registration problems because they moved since the last election. This makes sense – the lower and more unpredictable your income, the more likely you are to rent and to have to switch residences frequently. I’m sure GOP consultants have already figured out that “toughening” voter laws on place-of-residence will be in their favor. I’m guessing the only reason they haven’t targeted this group before was that their leadership was, until recently, hoping to capture a significant chunk of the Latino vote. Now that they’ve basically been forced to abandon that look for a whole bunch of local laws that antagonize Latinos but also reduce their vote – such as laws allowing or even mandating that officials check the citizenship papers of anyone at the polls, not just those voting – with clear threats of INS involvement.
The Democrats got lucky with Citizens United. Pure luck, because the Democratic leadership had no answer or plan except to keep doing what they were doing. I am concerned that we’re not going to get lucky twice, and once again we have no plan.
Yes, the ultimate effect is unknown, but Repubs have openly acknowledged that they are engaging in a coordinated vote suppression campaign, and votes ARE successfully being suppressed, as MomSense points out. And as you say, Repubs are just getting started with their “new” suppression strategy, and they now know the courts (state or federal) will not intervene to protect minority or other targeted voters in the states they take over. They will develop new suppression techniques, which they will be uniformly implemented in every state they control. The Repubs have been concentrating on perverting structures and institutions, which the headless Dems ignore.
Citizens United appears not to have massively affected statewide elections (in most cases). Hence prez, guv and senate elections haven’t (so far) been thrown as largely as Roberts Repubs hoped and expected, although Dems are always being very largely outspent (see Walkerstan), which WILL have some effect in all such races.
But the main rigging effect of the atrocious and baseless Citizens United ruling by Roberts Repubs is in House and state legislative districts, where each marginal CEO dollar is decisive. The 2010 federal election was clearly thrown by KKK Rover’s plutocrat groups, with Dem House incumbents being destroyed in a wave that hadn’t been seen since the early days of radio. There is no way that Obamacare alone accomplished this obliteration. Nor could braindead House Repubs be flushed in 2012, although obviously massive Repub gerrymandering is now also involved.
We likely will never see a Dem House again as a result of the Roberts Repubs, and the oceans of money pouring into state legislative races by plutocrats has polluted dozens of states, turning many purple states deep Red. That plutocrat bribery spigot will never be turned off. Without rational legislatures, nothing can be accomplished, and generations of progress in a state can be irretrievably destroyed in a single session—see Walkerstan, MI and NC. These are effectively Red states now. And vote suppression will be the GOP’s savior in Tex-ass, of course.
A new American Apartheid regime is being constructed by our noble patriotic “conservative” movement, and many, many whites will applaud every step of it.