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What Scares Republicans More Than Paying Workers a Living Wage? Voting Rights
During his State Of The Union Address, the President spent most of his time on ideas to improve our economy and with it our lives.
The only thing that scares Republicans more than paying workers a living wage is our right to vote. One can only imagine what they were thinking when the President said:
” Defending our freedom, though, is not just the job of our military alone. We must all do our part to make sure our God-given rights are protected here at home. That includes one of the most fundamental rights of a democracy: the right to vote. When any American, no matter where they live or what their party, are denied that right because they can’t afford to wait for five or six or seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals.
So tonight, I’m announcing a nonpartisan commission to improve the voting experience in America. It definitely needs improvement. I’m asking two long-time experts in the field — who, by the way, recently served as the top attorneys for my campaign and for Governor Romney’s campaign — to lead it. We can fix this, and we will. The American people demand it, and so does our democracy.”
Combine that with Senator Boxer’s LINE Act (recently co-sponsored by Senator Ben Nelson) and Republicans see their efforts to destroy this most basic freedom go up in smoke. It’s enough to send Republicans into a fetal position for some time.
One can almost imagine them muttering to one another. Bad enough the Democrats are sabotaging all our hard work to make sure only the right people vote. But, co-opting Mitt Romney’s lawyer, it’s a communist plot I tell ya!
Rick Scott was probably trying to find another way to say that he had nothing to do with the reduced voting hours that forced 102-year-old Desiline Victor and many other Floridians to wait 5 to seven hours to vote.
Perhaps the cruelty inherent in Florida’s voter suppression policies played a role in Marco Rubio’s night of the big gulp. After all, how can you possibly look voters in the eye knowing that your party was directly responsible for attacking the freedoms that Republicans say they love, but attack when it hurts their interests?
It’s more than time to set national standards assuring that your right to vote is equally protected no matter where you live and no matter who your state government is.
One thing I’m hoping for, though not mentioned in the President’s remarks. If we are to improve our voting experience, we need to fix the idea that dollars have voices worthy of protection under the constitution, while human voices are at the mercy of Republicans whose love for freedom, in truth, is restricted to their ever-dwindling voting base.
Image: Jewish Journal
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9 Responses to What Scares Republicans More Than Paying Workers a Living Wage? Voting Rights
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Shiva(Moderator)
Feb. 15th, 2013 at 9:21 pm
People need to be in jail. That’s all there is to it. anyone restricting voting must go to jail. Dem or Republican. Governor or city propaganda minister.
Reynardine
Feb. 16th, 2013 at 12:25 am
Well, to be sure, as a great many dextrosphere voices have complained, people who vote are likely to vote to have more “stuff”, and their doctrine is that you’re only allowed to get more “stuff” if you have plenty of “stuff” in the first place. On the other hand, if the ewepeople are allowed to get enough “stuff”, some of the “stuff” is likely to be education, which will make them, as Orwell noticed, “too” intelligent to let themselves be controlled politically by appeals to ignorance and desperation. Thus, denying them the effective use of the vote goes hand in hand with denying them access to “stuff”.
mjh
Feb. 16th, 2013 at 3:17 am
What Scares Republicans More Than Paying Workers a Living Wage? Voting Rights
Well, I was gonna go with “gun control” — but that works, too.
.
labman57
Feb. 16th, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Republican legislators have not even attempted to hide their contempt for the democratic process. In true Machiavellian fashion, they have displayed a willingness to take an ideological dump on the fundamental principles of our democracy in order to further their political agenda.
Since Republicans cannot count on the votes from key demographic sectors of the electorate, they have opted for a different approach — reduce the number of these citizens who are able to vote.
And so they have strategized (and to some extent, implemented) a three-pronged effort to curtail the ability of minority, student, and elderly voters to participate in the election process:
1) make it more difficult to “prove” your citizenship via voter ID legislation
- unlike voting, buying beer or boarding a commercial airliner are not constitutionally-guaranteed rights.
2) cull the registration database for names deemed to “probably” be fictitious or otherwise fraudulent. (Anyone whose surname ends in “-ez” is most certainly an invalid registrant …)
3) eliminate or drastically reduce early voting, since poor and elderly voters tend to have a more difficult time getting to the polls on the first Tuesday of November, and urban precincts are more likely to have extremely long lines that require you to stand for hours in line.
However, the right wingers’ fallacious perception of progressive minority voters as lazy and shiftless parasites on society was part of their undoing — they assumed that if the voting process was made too difficult, then the affected members of the electorate would simply opt out of the process — this clearly did not occur in the 2012 elections.
With respect to the voter ID legislation/registered voter purges that have been pushed forth by Republican-controlled state legislatures under the guise of reducing nonexistent “voter fraud”, GOP legislators should simply cut to the chase and proclaim that the only Americans who have a legitimate right to vote are those who are registered members of the Republican Party.
Dave Light
Feb. 17th, 2013 at 9:19 pm
labman: excellent response! Your points reminded me of the “mandatory sterilization” of deemed lesser people in the recent past, which was stealing a person’s reproductive rights, not to mention how barbarous the act. Stealing a persons right to vote is very similar and barbarous as well. Both types of strategies are carried out by the fearful oligarchs in order to defend their privilege to own all of the nations wealth through control of the masses. Their current favorite tool: the right-wing Christian GOP. Ignore their behavior, but expose their strategy and deceptive tactics. Some day they will be gone. Yes.
phooeyrat
Feb. 16th, 2013 at 1:26 pm
How about making all of us; the people their biggest fear. In my opinion.
jeff
Feb. 16th, 2013 at 6:07 pm
It would seem to me that, if you have an ever dwindling base you need to take pains to broaden your coalition. Instead, they seem to be circling the wagons and playing to an ever shrinking, more lunatic fringe. I think it’s reached the point where most people realize that a vote for even a reasonable Republican is a vote for the extremists who control the party. It’s gotten so bad that even Karl Rove isn’t hardcore enough for them.
Robert A Racine Jr.
Feb. 17th, 2013 at 10:48 am
The New conservative party is not contented to help the country but rule it, to them in the words of Rosevelt don’t worry about social security or taxes, just hand it to us we will take care of it even back then his wisdom foretold of a political party that would do things to hurt America, blocking the vote or changing zones in their sates to put the fix on electoral votes, they can’t seem to contemplate the idea of American values.
Reynardine
Feb. 17th, 2013 at 11:13 am
Roosevelt knew whereof he spoke: the Business Plot, q.v.