By the time you read this I will be in my home state of Louisiana. I am looking forward to it immensely. Seeing family, getting some shopping done, the festivals, perhaps going to see some music, and, of course, the food!
There are a few things I am not looking forward to. The biggest one is the midterm elections. When it comes to the midterms I am not overly optimistic for two reasons. The first is kind of two things but one feeds the other. Gerrymandering and voter suppression. Back in 2013 SCOTUS handed down Shelby County v. Holder which doesn’t so much disembowel the Voting Rights act of 1965 as take a hatchet to the Fourteenth Amendment. Shelby County v. Holder basically stopped requiring certain states, mostly former slave holding and Jim Crow enforcing states, and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting.
The Chief Justice, John Roberts, reasoned that though the law worked it was based on old fashioned methods of voter suppression rather than modern methods of voter suppression. *Technically* the Court sent the matter back to Congress to come up with new criteria. Unfortunately, the current Congress has as little interest in this as the current head of the Justice Department has in justice. In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG, points out “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” In short Roberts’ reasoning in the Court’s decision is that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 worked and we no longer need it whereas the great RBG believed that the results to which Roberts’ referenced meant the Act was actively working and therefore necessary. The behavior of the states since the Act has been eviscerated has proven the damned near omniscient RBG correct once again.
Five years on it’s become clear that the Shelby County v. Holder decision has helped to hand the country an era of energized white supremacy. Since this decision, which has allowed discriminatory laws to take effect, voting has rapidly become more difficult. These laws leave confusion and potential disenfranchisement in their wake putting up barriers that affect the poor, the elderly, Black people and Latinos. And the young. Many of these voter suppression efforts are blatantly aimed at blocking the Millennial vote. College IDs are not accepted, polling places are moved away from college campuses, DMVs are even shut down during peak times for students getting licenses or IDs. This attack on young voters isn’t even subtle.
And this is just the beginning.
In declining to hear Richard Brakebill, et al v. Alvin Jaeger North Dakota Secretary of State the SCOTUS essentially stripped the vote from Native people. Native communities often lack residential street addresses because the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in rural Native communities. Therefore many Native populations do not have residential addresses on their identification cards instead using P.O. boxes. The Republican held legislature of North Dakota altered the voter ID law so that an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ on their ID cannot be qualified to vote. A very specific inclusion that is obviously aimed to disenfranchise Native voters.
Then there is the fact that the guy in charge of the election in Georgia is also running in the election. Seriously, how is that legal? Kemp, the Georgia Secretary of State who is running in a very tight race for governor on the Republican ticket, has implemented an “exact match” process. Under this system, information on a voter application must exactly match data on file with the state’s Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration. If the information does not match perfectly an application is held for additional screening. Failures to match can include things like a middle name not being fully written out or a missing hyphen. According to the Associated Press while the state is roughly one-third black, 70 percent of the 53,000 applications held are from Black Georgians.This is on top of 670,000 voters purged last year.
When speaking of voter suppression we cannot forget the gerrymandering that Democrats have been loath to stop because, one day, they may once again be in the majority. Five years to the day after Shelby County v. Holder in their decision in Abbott v. Perez SCOTUS for the most part rejected a lower court’s finding that the Texas Republican Party had calculatedly weakened the power of black and Latino votes in legislative and state maps that it had redrawn after racial gerrymandering challenges in 2011.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority on Monday, said the lower court had committed a “fundamental legal error” by placing the responsibility to prove the maps’ constitutionality on the state instead of the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit. “The allocation of the burden of proof and the presumption of legislative good faith are not changed by a finding of past discrimination.” In her dissent Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the ruling came as a product of manipulations of both prior rulings and the evidentiary record by the majority. “As a result of these errors, Texas is guaranteed continued use of much of its discriminatory maps,” she wrote, joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan. “This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy.”
I could go on.
This leads us to the fact that Democratic leadership seems to suck. Infighting and a complete lack of huevos. The Democratic Party does not listen. When the Tea Party rose up in opposition to Obama the Republican Party took a step back, analyzed how to use the movement to its advantage, incorporated many of their strategies, and jumped forward. Maxine Waters says that Americans should carry on confronting members of the Trump administration and this is translated into a call to harassment- by her own party. The Democrats allow Republicans to enforce rules against them that the Republicans themselves break with impunity. They keep pushing for a center that the Republicans draw further and farther right.
It has been forty years since American workers had a raise. While the official unemployment rate is low the top three jobs in the US today are cashier, retail sales clerk, and fast food worker – none of which offer a living wage. Meanwhile, according to the CDC the suicide rate in the US is up over twenty-five percent (25%) since 2000. In rural states it is even higher as people attempt to deal with the economic fallout of repeated economic downturns often by turning to drugs, feeding both the opioid epidemic and the rapid rise of deaths due to liver damage. The American working class is literally being killed off by current policies. And still Democrats fail to insist that workers be included in the discussion.
At this moment remarkable grassroots movements comprised of millions of people are battling for a living minimum wage, standing up against fossil fuels and their poisonous pipelines, opposing fracking, waging war to remove lobbyist money from politics, supporting universal healthcare, and fighting for so much more. Each of these issues have energized volunteers and major donors. The Party has almost completely failed to take advantage of this robust grassroots expansion. In fact the Democratic Party does worse than ignore these movements, it seemingly tries to undermine them.
Democrats are immersed in respectability politics that haven’t been relevant since the 1980s. They keep trying to use the Clinton playbook, but the world has changed. They seek compromise even when it’s a mistake on all levels often alienating their supporters in the process. They try to pull in moderate independents at the expense of a base that, lacking inspiration, is either failing to show up at the polls or is actively abandoning them for other parties that they perceive as more vibrant- including the Republican Party. The Democrats avoid hard statements, hard choices, and any hint of partisanship. They think it makes them look reasonable. Instead it makes them look weak. As if they are unwilling or unable to fight for their constituents.
That, I think, is what it comes down to. The Democratic Party is far more diverse in age, race, and gender than the Republican Party. But it is still very rich and very white. For most of them the current white supremacist agenda is something they object to in an abstract way. They are more concerned with entrenching than fighting. To put it bluntly, they have do not feel they have skin in the game.
Things are changing, spectacularly, from the roots of the grass on up. I just don’t think the Democratic Party will survive it. Which may not be a bad thing. Tell me I am wrong.
Sources
https://www.naacp.org/latest/shelby-v-holder-three-years-later/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/how-shelby-county-broke-america/564707/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/18/a-majority-says-the-democratic-party-stands-for-nothing-except-the-only-thing-that-matters-in-2018/?utm_term=.dcc1485a3423
https://splinternews.com/democrats-wake-up-and-smell-the-failure-1797015279
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/12/just-when-you-thought-democrats-couldnt-get-any-more-oblivious
https://www.salon.com/2012/10/02/why_democrats_still_suck/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/how-shelby-county-broke-america/564707/
https://medium.com/@austinfrank/why-democrats-suck-f961a9f3f465
https://splinternews.com/democrats-wake-up-and-smell-the-failure-1797015279
https://www.theroot.com/i-finally-see-it-democrats-don-t-hate-trump-as-much-as-1826986900
https://www.theroot.com/the-democratic-party-is-not-our-friend-1822340351
https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/11/17961756/courts-voter-id-north-dakota-missouri
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/11/17964104/georgia-voter-registration-suppression-purges-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp