President Joe Biden last week attended fall graduation ceremonies at South Carolina State University, a historically black, land-grant university in Orangeburg, South Carolina. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn graduated from there decades ago. Orangeburg is the hometwon of The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson. White state troopers killed three students there during a demonstration in 1968 demonstration, known today as the Orangeburg Massacre.
Robinson explains that the event seemed to give Biden renewed energy in support of voting rights:
Speaking to an overwhelmingly Black audience, Biden found his voice — and his passion — when he turned to Republican attempts to curtail the voting rights of African Americans, Hispanics and other people of color. “I’ve never seen anything like the unrelenting assault on the right to vote,” Biden thundered. “Never. I don’t think any of you have, on this stage, ever seen it.”
Oh, some have, Robinson writes, citing the 1968 killings.
“It’s not just about who gets to vote or making it easier, as we used to try to do, to make people eligible to be able to vote,” Biden told the assembled graduates and their proud family members. “It’s about who gets to count the vote or whether your vote counts at all.”
“This new sinister combination of voter suppression and election subversion — it’s un-American, it’s undemocratic,” he added.
Except it is very American, Robinson reminds readers. As it was a century ago, so it is today.
The fight for voting rights has ebbed and flowed over the last half-century-plus but never ended. Echoing the expression “two steps forward, one step back,” Bishop William J. Barber II exhorts members of the Poor People’s Campaign and civil rights advocates today with “Forward together, not one step back!”
Nevertheless, we have seen multiple steps back just this year. Nineteen states have passed 33 laws limiting voting this year according to the Brennan Center’s October summary:
The 2020 federal election drew the United States’ highest voter turnout in more than a century, breaking records despite the Covid-19 pandemic and efforts to undermine the election process with the Big Lie of a stolen election.
In a backlash to this historic voter participation, many state lawmakers have proposed and enacted legislation to make it harder for Americans to vote, justifying these measures with falsehoods steeped in racism about election irregularities and breaches of election security.
In a story about Stacey Abram’s second run for governor in Georgia, the Associated Press reports:
This year, Republicans pushed through a new voting law in Georgia which, among other things, cuts days for requesting an absentee ballot, shortens early voting before runoff elections and limits drop boxes.
Democrats fear it will chip away at their gathering strength in Georgia, where President Joe Biden won the state’s 16 electoral votes and then Warnock and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff won runoffs in January, delivering control of the U.S. Senate to their party.
Republicans argue the law is fair to all and was necessary to restore confidence in the state’s elections after claims of fraud by then-President Donald Trump inflamed many GOP voters. Those claims have been debunked and repeatedly rejected by courts.
The Bad Faith Party is nothing if not as consistent as it is persistent. At least since Operation Eagle Eye in the early 1960s (referenced since Digby’s earliest days here), Republicans have worked assiduously to undermine faith in election administration to justify new voter suppression laws under the rubric of restoring confidence they themselves eroded. Right-wing talk radio, Fox News, and social media supercharged their efforts over the last 30 years.
Democrats’ weakness in the countryside away from heavily Black counties like Orangeburg mean Republicans dominate state legislatures across much of the country. Some of us are working to remedy that, but it will be a long slog.
Can you be as relentless as a Republican operative? Sure, we knew you could.
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