Are we at the point in America now where we can literally justify doing anything, no matter how obviously illegal or unconstitutional, so long as the person or people doing it happen to belong to the right political party?
I ask, because, well, there’s a guy in the White House who seems to care little for the rule of law in any regard, and that same brazen behavior has apparently trickled down (finally, something trickled down) to his minions, particularly here in the state of Alabama.
For a solid week now, Alabama Republican after Alabama Republican has pushed out statement after statement announcing that the Supreme Court has vindicated them and determined their congressional voting map was proper all along. They said that Alabama was restoring the vote to the people. They’ve said that the high court has sided with Alabama in ruling that race has no place in determining voting districts.
They’re liars.
The Supreme Court said no such thing. And in fact, the last thing the Supreme Court said specifically about Alabama’s congressional voting maps was that they were illegal racial gerrymanders that had to be corrected.
Those are the maps Alabama is trying to re-implement today – the ones determined by a federal court panel of three judges, two of whom were appointed by that ultra-lib Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional.
Our lawmakers know that they are illegal. They know that they illegally disenfranchised Black voters. They know that they sought to diminish Black voting rights, in a different manner but with similar results, just as the racists of yesteryear did by way of poll taxes and violence.
But the ends, it seems, justify the means today.
Even when that means is violating a law that they wrote themselves. Just four years ago. A law that they put to a vote. A law that was billed as a protection for the Alabama people and Alabama elections. A law the Alabama people approved by 80 percent.
It came in 2022, a couple of years into the pandemic and in the wake of Republicans everywhere whining about changes to elections that made it safer and easier for people to vote in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that was literally killing millions of people. As always, Republicans don’t like it when a lot of people cast ballots in elections – even if there is no fraud present in those higher turnout elections, as dozens of in-depth, Republican-backed investigations proved – so in response to all of the easier ways to cast ballots – mail-in, curbside, no-excuse-absentee, etc. – the GOP leaders in Alabama wrote out a new law.
That law: No changes to state elections within six months of the general election.
It was sponsored by Republican Rep. Jim Carns. It was a constitutional amendment, supposedly the strongest of all the laws. It passed the legislature. It was put on the ballot. More than 80 percent of Alabama voters who cast a ballot in 2022 approved it.
It is now law.
And the same Republicans who passed it now want everyone to ignore it.
Because they really, really want to make changes to state elections inside of six months. Like, now.
They called a whole special session last week to do just that. Passed a bill that allows the state to delay the primaries in four congressional districts and two state senate districts. Completely and utterly rewrites the state’s voting maps. Creates entirely new Democratic and Republican primaries that will result in completely different general election contests.
And it turns out they should have called their special session for the week before.
May 3 is the cutoff date.
They passed their cheating-in-elections bills from the special session and they were signed by Gov. Kay Ivey on May 8.
Oops.
Don’t sweat it, though, said Carns, the guy who sponsored the bill, because that constitutional amendment only deals with changes to the general election and what they did in the special session made changes to the primaries.
That’s a sound argument … unless you think about it for longer than a second. Then it becomes really, really dumb.
The changes approved during the special session did, indeed, alter primaries … by putting other people in them. Which in turn puts those other people in the general elections.
You see what I’m saying?
These people are quite literally running right through a law that they wrote and passed just four years ago in order to pass maps that they know full well are unconstitutional and they’re doing it all while praising themselves in press releases for doing it.
That’s on top of the president raking in illegal money left and right; his kids sitting on the boards of regulated entities; the potential GOP nominee for governor of Alabama not actually living in Alabama; and on and on and on.
It sure seems like laws have become merely minor inconveniences for lawmakers in one particular party. Inconveniences that they often ignore altogether.
That’s a problem. One that has the potential to end America as we know it.
