Reminder that the vote suppression law Georgia passed today will go into effect only because John Roberts decided to read Section 2 of the 15th Amendment out of the Constitution in the 21st century Dred Scott.
The persons responsible for the Voting Rights Act understood that legislatures could be very creative about inventing vote suppression measures, and created an elegant solution. The Supreme Court threw it out with a decision that barely even pretended to be constitutional law.
We have to assume this is the result he desired:
During the 2020 election cycle in Georgia, Donald Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state. His efforts to manipulate the electoral process failed after Raffensperger stood up to the president and defended the integrity of the election. But if the Georgia legislature has its way, Republicans could have a much easier time overturning the will of voters in future elections.
The Georgia House of Representatives passed a major power grab on Thursday that would remove Raffensperger as the chair and a voting member of the state election board, which oversees the certification of elections and voting rules, and instead allow the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of the board’s members. “This is extraordinarily dangerous,” says Sara Tindall Ghazal, the former election protection director of the Georgia Democratic Party. “When you’re appointing the majority of the body that you’re responsible to, it’s self-dealing.”
The state board, in turn, would have extraordinary power under the bill to take over county election boards it views as underperforming, raising the possibility that elections officials appointed by and beholden to the heavily gerrymandered Republican legislature could take over election operations in Democratic strongholds like Atlanta’s Fulton County, where Trump and his allies spread conspiracy theories about “suitcases” of ballots being counted by election officials in November after GOP poll monitors had left.
It is a matter of the utmost urgency that Congress act to preempt the New Jim Crow, and it’s a brutal indication of how debased the current Supreme Court is that the law will almost certainly stand if it doesn’t.
It’s also important to resist the emerging Savvy Contrarian take, that the wave of Republican vote suppression isn’t really that big of a deal. It’s true, for example, that it’s not obvious that in non-pandemic elections Republicans will benefit from reducing or eliminating no-excuse mail ballots. But that’s not the point — it’s very bad to make people in majority-minority precincts to wait hours to vote even if they’re willing to make the sacrifice.