https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/republicans-arent-looking-forward-theyre-stepping-into-jim-crow-past/
Opinion: Republicans aren’t ‘looking forward.’ They’re stepping into a Jim Crow
past.
Dana Milbank
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) gives his State of the State address in Austin in
February 2019. (Eric Gay/AP)
Move along, the Republicans say. Nothing to see here.
“I’m looking forward not backward,” says Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell
(Ky.).
“A lot of our members,” affirms Senate GOP whip John Thune (S.D.), “want to be
moving forward and not looking backward.”
“We want to be united in looking, moving forward,” offers House GOP leader
Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt picked up the theme in his Post column,
published Sunday with this subhead: “As the GOP gears up for 2022, it’s not
looking back.”
Yet, on the very day that pronouncement of forward motion appeared, Republicans
took two giant steps backward.
That day in Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature tried to ram through a
bill so flagrantly restricting the ability of Blacks and Latinos to vote that
it wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in the Jim Crow era, before the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. After Democrats temporarily foiled the plan by
walking out and denying the legislature a quorum, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott
tried some Lone Star authoritarianism: He threatened to defund the legislature.
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Also Sunday, and also in Texas, former president Donald Trump’s former national
security adviser, Michael Flynn, told a gathering of QAnon followers that a
military coup “should” happen in the United States. (Former Trump lawyer Sidney
Powell earlier told the assembly that Trump could be “reinstated.”) Taking the
stage at the same conference were Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and state
Republican Party Chairman Allen West, a former congressman. Gohmert, who posed
with a self-proclaimed participant in the insurrection, told the QAnon faithful
that the Capitol attack wasn’t so bad (he drew laughs for mockingly calling
Jan. 6 “a day that will live in infamy”) and that “it wasn’t just right-wing
extremists in there.”
This is looking forward? Republicans may not wish to examine the attack on the
Capitol, and Trump’s role in it, but they are otherwise pining for the past —
and willing to circumvent democracy to restore it.
The Texas legislation proposed to abolish drive-up voting and 24-hour voting,
both methods used disproportionately by non-White voters. As The Post’s Amy
Gardner reported, Black and Latino voters in Harris County, home to Houston,
accounted for more than half of those using such methods, though they are just
38 percent of the electorate. The Texas bill also aimed to ban voting before 1
p.m. on Sundays — directly aiming at the traditional “souls to the polls”
get-out-the-vote efforts among Black churchgoers. Republicans also planned to
restrict people from driving churchgoers to the polls in such efforts. An
earlier draft of the bill even used language about maintaining the “purity of
the ballot box” — language once used in defense of White-only voting.
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Such attempts to disenfranchise racial minorities are now commonplace in
Republican-controlled states. According to the latest tally by the Brennan
Center for Justice, a voting-rights group, at least 14 states have enacted laws
this year restricting the right to vote. That’s on pace to set a modern record,
with more such bills moving through 18 state legislatures. Among the most
infamous new restrictions is Georgia’s law making it illegal for anybody to
offer food or drink — even water — to voters waiting in long lines. Such lines
exist primarily in Black precincts, because Republicans have reduced the number
of polling places and hours of voting in those areas.
The impetus is obvious. The 2020 election showed that if voters turn out in
large numbers, Democrats win. This will only become more so as America becomes
more multicultural. The Republican response has been to stop non-White people
from voting, in the name of stopping nonexistent voter fraud.
Republicans in Congress, for their part, are blocking H.R. 1, the Democrats’
attempt to protect voting rights against such incursions. Republicans are also
resisting action on an attempt to restore provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights
Act gutted by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority in 2013. Apparently,
the Republicans’ idea of “moving forward” is restoring the status quo ante —
ante 1965, that is.
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Or maybe even ante 1789. A questioner at the QAnon confab asked Flynn, a
retired general, “why what happened in Minamar (sic) can’t happen here,”
referring to the military coup in Myanmar.
“No reason, I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That’s right,” Flynn
replied.
After a social media uproar, Flynn later walked back his endorsement of the
violent overthrow of the U.S. government. But he offered no such retreat from
the lies that caused the deadly attack on the Capitol. “Trump won,” he told the
QAnon faithful. “He won the popular vote, and he won the electoral college
vote.”
And that would be true — if you counted only the votes of White people.
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