Florida’s GOP war on (minority and Democratic) voters has two parts. First, there is the well-publicized effort to throw tens of thousands of legitimate voters off the rolls in ostensible pursuit of what may be only a handful of noncitizen voters at most.
The second, less-well-known effort, is a new set of Florida state rules that make it very difficult to register new voters, and create severe penalties for anyone who doesn’t precisely comply with them. These rules are so onerous that many groups that formerly routinely ran voter registration drives, like the League of Women Voters, stopped doing it because they found the new rules were impossible to comply with.
Now, thanks to a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters of Florida, Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and Rock the Vote, a federal judge in Tallahassee, no hotbed of liberalism, has issued a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of key parts of the voter-registration-suppression scheme:
The statute and rule impose a harsh and impractical 48-hour deadline for an organization to deliver applications to a voter registration office and effectively prohibit an organization from mailing applications in. And the statute and rule impose burdensome record-keeping and reporting requirements that serve little if any purpose, thus rendering them unconstitutional even to the extent they do not violate the [National Voting Rights Act].
This is good news, and on a quick read I found the opinion very persuasive, so I have high hopes that it would survive an appeal (although voting law is not my area, so I welcome other views).
These are the people that burned witches in Europe in an attempt to suppress Renaissance culture and science.
They’re systematically trying to undo everything the American Revolution represented.
In all fairness, it stared with Hamilton’s tenure as Treasury Secretary, when he sold America to the bankers who speculated on the Revolution. The speculators and bankers who made up the legislature bought up war bonds from farmers at rock-bottom prices, and then paid themselves off at the face value of the securities, funded by the Whiskey Tax. Instant aristocracy.
But the gutting of public broadcasting, gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, FCC-sanctioned media consolidation, all these undermine the free press (free only for those wealthy enough to own a press).
Dismantling public education, fabricated controversies surrounding evolution and climate change, and a general intensification of anti-intellectualism (ala Sarah Palin) undermine the “useful sciences” on which our “democratic experiment” was modeled.
Say goodbye to “informed rational debate.” Say goodbye to “voter participation.” Until 1850 only white land-owning males could vote (the capitalist class): we’re just returning to our roots. These are “traditional” values.
You’re no longer a citizen, you’re a consumer: a statistical construct defined by the monopoly capitalism that keeps you trapped in serfdom, bound to the corporate estate.
Welcome to the new, scientifically-adjusted feudalism.