How Should America Protect Its Democracy?
At the same time that the GOP is passing controversial legislation in a number of states concerning mail-in voting and voter ID laws, they are also blocking the Democrats’ sweeping voter rights legislation. Democrats see this as voter suppression. Republicans say they’re just trying to fight fraud. More at New York Times.
…you cannot silence a population. You can disenfranchise them. You can even take away peaceful protest as an option, as various laws are already doing. But they won’t just sit there and watch their rights being taken away. Our own Founders argued that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”
… the public supports voter ID despite the Left’s decades of scaremongering against it — they are finally willing to jettison the claims they knew were meretricious all along. They knew that even liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens led the way in pronouncing voter ID fully constitutional as a legitimate interest in preventing vote fraud.
Why are Democrats compromising over voting rights, when Republicans won’t even support that compromise to begin with? Why not introduce and pass legislation to actually solve the problem, if Republicans aren’t going to support it to begin with?