Democracy

Thom Hartmann -  Republicans in Georgia have been champions at pioneering new ways to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Their latest scam is breathtaking.

First, the background. When Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp was Secretary of State — the state’s top elections official — and running against Stacey Abrams for Governor in 2018, Abrams’ organization had registered 53,000 people (70% African American) to vote. Kemp put those registrations on hold so they couldn’t vote in the 2018 election, which he won by 54,723 votes.

But that was just the beginning for Kemp. By the year prior to the 2018 election he’d purged a total of 1.4 million voters from the rolls, claiming he was just removing people who’d died or moved. On a single night in July 2017 he removed half a million voters, about 8% of all registered Georgia voters, an act The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “may represent the largest mass disenfranchisement in US history.”

 Investigative reporter Greg Palast hired the company Amazon uses to verify addresses and ran the names and addresses of those 534,000 people Kemp purged that July day through their system: 334,000 of them, most Black, had neither died nor moved. But they’d sure lost their right to vote. 

Washington Post - In the District of Columbia, the federal government already influences everything from city council spending to the location of the city government’s office buildings. Republicans have now endorsed even greater federal control over the city and its 680,000 inhabitants as part of their 2024 platform. Apparently, former president Donald Trump isn’t kidding when he promises, frequently, to “take over the horribly run capital of our nation.”

Assuming that Mr. Trump could pass the appropriate legislation, a takeover could be perfectly constitutional, given Congress’s unique authority over the District. But it would also be rankly undemocratic, reverse one of the civil rights movement’s signal achievements and, on a practical level, make life in D.C. worse.

For a taste of what Republicans might have in mind for a Trump-led takeover of D.C., consult the nearly 50 bills to change laws in the District — on subjects as diverse as sports team logos and local election laws — that GOP lawmakers have proposed in recent years. One would ban abortion in the city; another would repeal home rule entirely. The platform outlined at the Republican National Convention this month justifies federal control in the name of restoring “Law and Order in our Capital City.” And, to be sure, crime in the District spiked during the pandemic (as it did in most other cities), partly because of the city’s own missteps. In fact, the D.C. Council tried to impose a sweeping criminal code reform that critics, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, argued would have made it harder for authorities to restore public safety.