Trumplicans determined to curb voting
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| By Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution |
But I wasn’t mad that Ted fled. What
upset me was that the government let him back into our country.
Cruz is, after all, the self-aggrandizing ego that arrogantly and illegally tried to cancel the ballots of millions of voters in last year’s presidential election.
Then he helped dupe
a crowd of Trumpeteers into storming our nation’s Capitol in a violent and
silly attempt to seize control of our government by force.
Now the wannabe autocrat is
demanding that the Supreme Court suppress the people’s democratic will.
He’s teamed up with the sour old
corporate plutocrat, Mitch McConnell, to back a ploy by Arizona Republicans to
disenfranchise Latino, Indigenous, and Black voters.
Cruz and McConnell are demanding
that the Court’s partisan Republican justices gut America’s landmark Voting
Rights Act, which prohibits states from altering election rules to give
minority voters less opportunity to participate in the political process than
Anglos.
Arizona’s Republican lawmakers had passed a nasty provision declaring that any ballot cast in the wrong precinct, no matter how valid, must be tossed in the trash, rather than merely allocating it to the voter’s correct precinct.
This almost entirely affects people of
color, with whom GOP election officials play nefarious games — frequently
moving their voting places, often at the last minute with little notice.
Instead of pushing their party to
try winning these peoples’ votes, Ted and Mitch simply want to eliminate them.
They’ve asked the Court to nullify the bothersome Voting Rights Act so their
party can freely lock out minority voters.
The greatest threat to our democracy
is not a violent mob, but a legalistic coup by thugs like Ted Cruz.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
