The careerists join the cult
by digby
If you want to see Trumpism in all its glory, just hanging right out there, this guy is it:
I don’t know about you but I think that smug asshole ought to have his mouth washed out with soap. Bigly.
He won the nomination. And what’s important about that is that he’s not just some loon on the fringe. He’s the Georgia Secretary of State and he’s not just sitting around watching Fox News and pleasuring himself like some people we know. He’s putting his disgusting words into action:
On Thursday evening, the election board of Randolph County, Georgia, met to discuss a startling proposal to eliminate three-fourths of the county’s polling places months before the November election. A rural, impoverished, and predominantly black county, Randolph has just nine polling locations, all of which were open during the May primaries and July runoffs. The election board may soon shut down seven of them, including one in a precinct where about 97 percent of voters are black. Its plan would compel residents, many of whom have no car or access to public transit, to travel as much as 30 miles round trip to reach the nearest polling place.
Because of its history of racist voting laws, Randolph County was once required to seek federal permission before altering its election procedures. But after the Supreme Court gutted this oversight in 2013, the county was freed to crack down on the franchise. It is no coincidence that its election board chose this moment to shutter most of its polls: In November, the popular Democrat Stacey Abrams will compete for the governorship against Republican Brian Kemp, the current Georgia secretary of state. Kemp, who has devoted his time in office to a ruthless campaign of voter suppression, called upon Randolph County to abandon the plan when it spurred widespread outrage. That being said, the key figure in the Randolph County controversy is a Kemp ally who was handpicked by the secretary of state to close polls throughout Georgia.
To understand the brazen attack on black suffrage now occurring in Randolph County, it’s important to remember that Georgia is in the midst of a seismic demographic shift. As whites cease to be the majority in more and more counties, Republicans have clung to power by disenfranchising minority voters. Kemp’s opposition to the Randolph County plan marks the first time that he has adopted an affirmatively pro-suffrage stance. During his nearly eight years as secretary of state, Kemp engaged in mass voter purges, removing hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls. State officials appear to have singled out black voters in targeted purges.
Kemp also canceled or suspended 35,000 voter registrations using Exact Match, a version of Kris Kobach’s notorious Crosscheck program that compares registrants’ information with motor vehicle and Social Security databases. If a single letter, space, or hyphen did not match the database information, the voter application was rejected. Black voters were eight times more likely than whites to have their registrations halted due to Exact Match
Perhaps most egregiously, Kemp launched an investigation into Abrams’ efforts to register more minority voters despite no evidence of fraud. He used the probe to harass and intimidate voting rights advocates. Later, he refused to register 40,000 would-be voters who had signed up through the drive. Speaking to Republicans behind closed doors, Kemp explained the stakes: “Registering all these minority voters that are out there … if they can do that, they can win these elections.” During Kemp’s tenure, Georgia’s population has increased substantially—yet the number of registered voters has actually gone down.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Kemp seems to have played a major role in the Randolph County poll closures. At the meeting on Thursday night, the election board revealed that the move had been encouraged by Mike Malone, an associate of Kemp’s. Malone, who attended the meeting, explained that Kemp—who now claims that the poll closures are a bad idea—had asked him to go around the state and “recommend polling place closures” to various counties. Ten Georgia counties have already taken Malone’s suggestions and closed polling places. All of those counties have large black populations.
Malone has claimed that he chose which polls to close by gauging their compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Rather than target certain communities, he merely advised election boards to shutter polling places that are not ADA compliant. Notably, many of these locations are government buildings that should already comply with ADA regulations. (Several polling places selected for closure in Randolph County, for instance, are fire stations.) But rather than direct counties to fix whatever ADA problems they might have, Malone simply suggested these locations be scrapped.
At Thursday’s meeting, a county resident also asked Malone whether he had considered finding alternative polling places, like churches, that might be ADA compliant. Malone shot back that he was “not hired to find alternatives.” Another resident asked how much he was being paid for his consultant work. He refused to answer.
Sean J. Young, legal director of the Georgia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me on Friday that he found Malone’s answers disturbing.
“The purpose of this ‘consultancy’ is not to explore the best ways to serve the voters with polling places that are up to code,” Young said. “It’s to shut down polling places. This alleged concern with ADA compliance is a total sham.”
We’re really supposed to believe that the man in that campaign ad is concerned with people with disabilities? No, of course we are not. He is trolling even more competently than Trump himself. They want people to know they are not serious.
This man is the future of the Republican Party. If they continue to win (by whatever means they find) this is going to be the norm.
Paul Krugman described this accurately in his column today:
Republicans who defended Trump over the Muslim ban, his early attacks on the press, the initial evidence of collusion with Russia, have in effect burned their bridges. It would be deeply embarrassing to admit that the elitist liberals they mocked were right when they were wrong; also, nobody who doesn’t support Trump will ever trust their judgment or patriotism again.
So the path of least resistance is always to sign on for the next stage of degradation. “No evidence of collusion” becomes “collusion is no big deal” becomes “collusion is awesome — and let’s send John Brennan to jail.”
To some extent this is just human weakness in action. But there are some special aspects of the modern GOP that make it especially vulnerable to this kind of slide into leader-worship. The party has long been in the habit of rejecting awkward facts and attributing them to conspiracies: it’s not a big jump from claiming that climate change is a giant hoax perpetrated by the entire scientific community to asserting that Trump is the blameless target of a vast deep state conspiracy.
And modern Republican politicians are, with few exceptions, apparatchiks: they are creatures of a monolithic movement that doesn’t allow dissent but protects the loyal from risk. Even if they should happen to lose a race in their gerrymandered districts, as long as they toed the line they can count on “wing nut welfare” — commentator slots on Fox News, appointments at think tanks, and so on.
Even now, I don’t think most political commentators have grasped how deep the rot goes. I don’t think they understand, or at any rate admit to themselves, that democracy really could die just a few months from now.
And if it doesn’t, if Republicans lose Congress and Trump leaves office on or before January 2021, the same people who kept declaring that Trump just became president will try to go back to pretending that Republican politicians are serious, honorable people who care about policy. But they aren’t.
So remember this moment. We’re seeing, in real time, what the GOP is really made of.
Yep.