Nothing matters anymore.
That last smidgen of decorum walked out of the door the very moment the majority of justices on our nation’s highest court argued in favor of eliminating race as a cure for correcting absurdly racist voting districts.
In other words, our U.S. Supreme Court is on the verge of saying that it’s wrong to use race to redraw a district that was drawn using race as a means to discriminate against certain voters.
Because there will never be a cure too stupid to soothe the fragile, white ego.
We are in the midst of quite a White Renaissance—not that we needed one. White people still own and control pretty much everything, and they’ve been hoarding wealth since the 1980s. But there was a Black president and some marches and we capitalized the B in Black when talking about Black people, and dammit, that all needed to be reeled back in.
So, here we are, making lists of people who dared point out that saying racist stuff was, well, racist, and abducting Hispanic-looking people off the streets on a whim and electing people who built a campaign on screaming about migrant workers EATING THE DOGS (which mysteriously stopped the day after the election). And with a U.S. Supreme Court teetering on the verge of abolishing the Voting Rights Act.
Talk about a legacy. How’d you like to be the grandkid of John Roberts or one of these other conservative activist justices and forever have your family name tied to the abolishment of landmark legislation that sought to simply establish equal rights?
No wonder these abhorrent humans are trying to destroy books. Someone might catalog what they actually did.
Right in line with this deplorable behavior comes Alabama’s current Secretary of State Wes Allen, who somehow found the one awful thing the Trump administration hasn’t proposed when it comes to limiting voting rights—banning everyone who wasn’t born in America from running for constitutional office.
Apparently, it’s not enough for Republicans to pick their voters, they also want to be able to limit the candidates those voters might choose.
This proposal from Allen is so awful that even—and I can’t believe I’m about to type this—former U.S. Representative Mo Brooks took issue with it. Yeah, that Mo Brooks.
Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., speaks with a reporter as he leaves the Capitol after the final vote of the week on Wednesday, June 5, 2019. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
In an op-ed for AL.com, Brooks wrote that the proposal from Allen and his two co-sponsors, Representative Rhett Marques and Senator Danny Chesteen, was catastrophically damaging to conservatives because it was overtly discriminatory and wrong.
“Personally, I submit discrimination against American citizens based solely on who they are or where they are from is not only evil and wrong, it is political suicide,” Brooks wrote.
(Can I just say how weird it is that so many Republicans suddenly find a conscience and a distaste for discrimination after leaving public office.)
But see, that’s not what Allen, Marques and Chesteen believe. It’s not what the Trump administration believes. It’s not what so many pro-MAGA Republicans believe.
They believe this is who YOU are.
They believe this is what you want. They believe that you like this discrimination. They believe that you’re OK with discriminatory voting districts and booting citizens off of ballots because they weren’t born here. They think you hate the Hispanics and Haitians and the Asians and the Blacks—and they’re crafting these things to appeal to you.
Don’t dispute it. That’s the only reason anyone in politics does anything—to get votes.
And they think this stuff will get your votes.
How does that make you feel?
How does it make you feel to know that you were the target audience of a guy running for president of this country when he was screaming about Haitians eating the dogs? How does it make you feel to know that ALGOP politicians had you in mind when they crafted Alabama’s racist immigration law a few years ago? How does it make you feel to know that Allen and his cronies have you in mind when they put forth a constitutional amendment that wouldn’t allow you to vote for naturalized citizens?
And how does it make you feel to know that Republicans, and their like-minded Supreme Court justices, think you’ll look the other way as they abolish the Voting Rights Act once and for all and rig elections?
It should make you ask a few questions about yourself. It should force some introspection. It should prompt you to take a stand for what’s right.
It should matter.
