Greetings,
I was three years old when Dr. King stood at the Lincoln Memorial and described his vision for a better society. Only two lifetimes before, the Civil War was ending with over 600,000 dead and by 1870, the legal idea of ‘people’ had expanded beyond ‘white’ (with the notable exception of Women, who waited until 1920 for their vote). The US was poised to move away from a herrenvolk democracy and down the path of a racially diverse democratic republic.
It was a short path. The Confederacy was defeated, not changed, and racial diversity did not come easily. Separate-but-equal was locked in by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, and a baby born in the South at the end of the 1800’s would spend their entire lifetime under violent apartheid.
The second lifetime after the Civil War brought violence, oppression, degradation, and humiliation across the country, but an unrepentantly Segregationist South slowly created pressure for change. After bloody decades Dr. King’s Dream speech helped pass the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. A baby born in the South at the end of the 1960’s could hope to see apartheid crumble in their lifetime.
But in the 1970’s Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ made a direct appeal to the racists betrayed by MLK and LBJ, creating the pool for today’s brand of race-motivated Trump Republican. Around this same time, the Powell Memo was shaping a new, explicitly activist, pro-business, anti-democratic breed of Corporate Republican Party. Though neither wing of the Republicans necessarily hated the targets of the other, both wanted to hold power in an America where they were demographically and philosophically becoming minorities. Seeing common cause in voter suppression, the Confederates joined with the Corporatists and spent 40 years slurring the Democrats as the party of ‘Blacks’ and ‘Hippies’.
Republicans used their power from the Reagan 80’s onward to pack the courts at all levels and decimated the Voting Rights law in just the past decades. On the Corporate side, the SCOTUS’ Buckley (1976), McCutcheon (2014), and Citizens United (2020) decisions combined to enable dark unaccountable election money and outright purchase of politicians. On the Confederate side, their 2013 Shelby County decision gutted the Justice Department’s power to enforce Voting Rights in any state, but particularly in the Confederate states that were openly defying them just 50 years before.
The 2021 Brnovich decision found that it wasn’t enough to prove a voting law directly destructive to a specific population, plaintiffs had to prove… prove… that it was written to do exactly that.
Brnovich did even more. Justice Alito’s decision opened the door to use voter fraud ‘concerns’ to justify election changes without actual proof of fraud. Now, vote thieves offer can ‘concerns about voting security’ as a fig leaf, but the laws being enacted in Republican-held State Houses are ‘securing’ an election against bogeymen created by fraud and proven lies. That these laws also block large swaths of real Americans from voting is a side effect. It’s only an ironic coincidence that this has been the stated goal and demonstrated intent of a faction of America since before the Civil War; we just need to live with it for secure elections.
Except we don’t. In reality… in actual, confirmable, consensual Reality… there is no problem with Voter Fraud. Our elections are as secure as they’ve ever been. The system isn’t perfect at all, and there are real threats that justify doubts. Updates in cyber security, transparency, election infrastructure, and ballot technology are long overdue. Things as simple as mail-in voting could improve it even more. Electoral Fraud, where the outcome of an election is changed, is very real, effective, and a poison to any democracy. It includes gerrymandering, polling placement, ID requirements, election timing, and more. None of the Republican-led election laws would touch any of these points. But our Election System itself IS secure and our right to vote is secure as well, protected by the power of the Voting Rights Act, a shining shield that… oh… yeah… that’s right.
The right most fundamental to democracy of any kind is threated in America, the self-proclaimed last bastion of democracy and freedom. Half of our Congress is controlled by a party in either open or quiet rebellion against the United States, and now they’re poised to stifle opposition for another lifetime. Democracy’s last defenders are corporate-tainted-but-possibly-not-quite-as-corrupt Biden and the Democrats. Hooray. Look, the person who wants to steal your vote is your enemy. In the past they wore gray uniforms, now they wear gray suits, but they are the same enemies of the United States then and now. Don’t let your, our, or anyone else’s vote be silenced.
Make a great day,
Digging Deeper
The Voting Rights Act
How The Voting Rights Act Came To Be And How It’s Changed, Carrie Johnson on NPR, Aug 2021
Voting Rights Act (1965)– This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.
1970 and 1975 Voting Rights Act Amendments, Your Vote, Your Voice
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act
Voting Rights Act of 1965, History.com
Jurisdictions Previously Covered By Section 5, United States Department of Justice
In 2013 the supreme court gutted voting rights – how has it changed the US? Sam Levine and Ankita Rao in The Guardian, Jun 2020
Supreme Court Upholds Arizona Voting Restrictions in Another Blow to Voting Rights Act, Madeleine Carlisle and Sanya Mansoor in Time, Jul 2021
Current Attacks
19 states enacted voting restrictions this year, Stef Kight on Axios, Dec 2021
The Clash Over the Vote, Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice, Jan 2022
How Republicans and SCOTUS are shrinking the power of voters of color, Brandon Tensley on CNN, Jul 2021
The Republicans’ Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona, Sue Halpern in The New Yorker, Jun 2021
The Assault on Americans’ Voting Rights—A Quick Take, Juan Diego Mazuera Arias and Danny Weiss at The Century Foundation, May 2021
New laws alone won’t save voting rights, Analysis of Biden’s Georgia voting rights speech by Greg Palast for FlashPoints Jan 2022
Voter Suppression, Greg Palast Website
Voting Laws Roundup, the Brennan Center for Justice, Oct 2021. In an unprecedented year so far for voting legislation, 19 states have enacted 33 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote.
Supreme Court guts what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, John Wojcik in People’s World, Jul 2021
The Republicans’ Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona, Sue Halpern in the New Yorker, Jun 2021
After 2020 loss, GOP targets voting restrictions, NBC News, Mar 2021
One Year Later, Our Democracy is Still in Crisis; Voter suppression is rearing its head at every turn. Bobby Hoffman at the American Civil Liberties Union, Jan 2022
Corporate sedition is more damaging to America than the Capitol attack, Robert Reich in The Guardian, Jan, 2022
How the Supreme Court and the morbidly rich are ruining democracy in America, Thom Hartmann on Salon.com, Oct 2019
The roots of corporate personhood, Public Citizen, Jan 2010
The Federalist Society, Charles Letherwood on Tom Dwyer Automotive Services, Feb 2019
The 2014 McCutcheon v. FEC case, Andrew Prokop on Vox, May 2015
McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, Oyez.org, Apr 2014
The Corporate Insurrection: How companies have broken promises and funded seditionists, Angela Li and Areeba Sha at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Jan 2022
Debunking False Claims About the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, Andrew Garber at the Brennan Center for Justice, Jan 2022
Congress Can Stop the Assault on Voting Rights, Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice, Mar 2021
Voting and Election Laws, USA.gov
Fighting Back
10 voting rights organizations making sure all our votes count. Christina Refford on Cool Mom Picks, Nov 2021
How U.S. voting rights are under attack – and your help is needed, Panel at the American Bar Association’s 2021 Annual Meeting
The Voting Rights Alliance, website
Common Cause, website
League of Women Voters, website
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, website
Voting Rights, American Civil Liberties Union
Sedition and Treason
Mike Pence equates voting rights protections with Capitol attack, Sam Levine in The Guardian, Jan 2022
Opinion: Jan. 6 was a tragedy. Busting the filibuster would be, too. Mike Pence in Washington Post, Jan 2022
Texas lawmaker says Dem voting rights bill an assault on democracy: We’re ‘tired of the swamp games’, Rep. Chip Roy on FOX News™, Jan 2022
Marjorie Taylor Greene calls for a national divorce between Republican and Democratic states, Andrew Feinberg in The Independent, Dec 2021
Trump has told us how he and the Republicans plan to steal this election: can we stop him and save our republic? Thom Hartmann, ThomHartmann.com, Sep 2020
Trump and Republicans Are Staging a Hayes/Tilden Coup; They Don’t Need to Win Lawsuits, Just Stall, Rob Kall on Daily Kos, Nov 2020
Ignoring FBI And Fellow Republicans, Trump Continues Assault On Mail-In Voting, Miles Parks on NPR, Aug 2020
Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots, Eugene Kiely and Rem Rieder on FactCheck.org, Sep 2020
Election Security
27 possible voter fraud cases in 3 million Wisconsin ballots, Scott Bauer in AP News, May 2021
Mail Ballot Security Features: A Primer, Lisa Danetz at the Brennan Center, Oct 2020
Election Security Rumor vs. Reality, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, constantly updated
Republicans’ Phony Argument for Election Audits, David Graham in The Atlantic, June 2021
The Trump Administration Continues to Erode Election Security, Garrett Graff in Wired, Sep 2020
Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail, Priscilla Southwell in The Conversation, Sep 2020
Despite GOP rhetoric, there have been fewer than two dozen charged cases of voter fraud since the election- One person has faced charges for every 10 million votes cast, Philip Bump in Washington Post, May 2021
The Truth About Voter Fraud, The Brennan Center for Justice, Justin Levitt, Nov 2007
Election of 1876
How the 1876 Election Tested the Constitution and Effectively Ended Reconstruction, Sarah Pruitt on History.com, Aug 2020
Abandoning Democracy: A failure to pass meaningful voting rights will signal the death of our republic, Thom Hartmann in Milwaukee Independent, Jan 2022
Disputed Election of 1876, Sheila Blackford at the UVA Miller Center
The Southern Strategy and party realignment
Why are Blacks Democrats? Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird on Princeton.edu, Feb 2020
Damn Dirty Hippies! Eric Rauchway in The New Republic, Dec 2007
How the ‘Party of Lincoln’ Won Over the Once Democratic South, Becky Little on History.com, Apr 2019
‘The politics of racial division’: Trump borrows Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’, Daniel Strauss in The Guardian, Sep 2020
Jim Crow South
This Map Shows Over a Century of Documented Lynchings in the United States, Danny Lewis at Smithsonian Magazine, Jan 2017
Monroe & Florence Work Today, PlainTalkHistory.com
Map reveals that lynching extended far beyond the deep South, Penn State University, Jan 2022
Jim Crow Era, Howard University
What was Jim Crow?, Ferris State University
Tom’s not shy about sharing his opinions, and Tom’s Tidbits is just one place to find them… you can also catch some of them at OpEdNews. Two of our favorites from this year were ‘Betrayed by Domestic Enemies’ in response to the Jan 6 insurrection, and ‘Hold on… are YOU a radical?’ in which he looks at some American priorities that don’t get much attention. If you ever have a response to Tom, we’d like to hear it and share it with the Your Car Matters audience! Just email your thoughts to TomDwyer@TomDwyer.com.
