Close The Cage Doors

by digby

C&L has been following the story about the Kansas Republican chairman who boasted publicly and proudly that he’s been “caging” voters and makes a good observation:

All kidding aside, what has become of Kobach’s admission to caging “more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years“? The blogs and even the media seem to have done their part. So, what happens next? Did it go unnoticed because the story broke during the holidays? We’ve yet to hear from Kansas Governor Sebelius or any of the Democrats running in ‘08 who could be most affected by any GOP election trickery, Rep. Nancy Boyda or Senate challenger Greg Orman (who is going up against Bush lackey Sen, Pat Roberts), what they think or whether anyone is going to dig deeper to find out just what the Kansas GOP’s voter caging scheme is all about.

This seems like a no-brainer to me. A Republican operative says out loud that he’s caging voters and the Demcoratic establishment says nothing? What’s wrong with them?

This issue is going to be huge in the fall. Between the Supreme Court’s likely backing of voter ID in Indiana and a strong push to suppress the Latino vote (along with GOP desperation) voting rights should be front and center for Democrats everywhere in the country. If it isn’t they are going to be sorry. We all are.

I wrote about this story on The CAF Blog a while back. In light of the aristocracy’s view that American’s don’t actually have a right to vote, I have long been in favor of Jesse Jackson Jr’s call for a constitutional amendment which makes it clear even to royalists like Scalia and Roberts that whether they like it or not, democracy requires that the government protect and expand the franchise not obstruct it.

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