Over the weekend, we had an extraordinary look into the fundamental moral and political corruption of this administration*, and into how it stems from the fundamental moral and political corruption of conservative Republican politics that has been festering for four decades now, and began long before the current president* was a sparkle in Vladimir Putin’s third eye. You may recall that, last March, the Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that the department would be adding a “citizenship question” to the 2020 census. (The last time this type of question was asked was in 1950.) This raised all kinds of holy hell, and more than two dozen states and local municipalities are currently suing the administration over it.

On Friday, as part of this litigation, the Justice Department—Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, presiding—released over 1,300 documents having to do with Ross’s decision, and those documents are an extensive archive on the subject of how to disenfranchise inconvenient populations, and how to minimize the influence of inconvenient political opinions. They also make Ross look like even more of a stooge. A lot of shebeen favorites also play important roles. From NPR:

In a July 2017 email to Ross's chief of staff, Wendy Teramoto, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says Steve Bannon — the former White House strategist — directed Kobach to speak on the phone with Ross in 2017 during the early months of the Trump administration about the then lack of a citizenship question on the census. Kobach had once helped lead Trump's now-dissolved voter fraud commission. Neither Kobach nor Bannon have responded to NPR's requests for comment about this email. A Commerce Department spokesperson would not provide any details about the phone call between Kobach and Ross. "The Kobach email is one out of over 500 pages of stakeholder records produced in the administrative record," the spokesperson wrote in an email. "The notion that Secretary Ross decided to reinstate the citizenship question in response to a single email is clearly disproved by the robust administrative record."

Bannon to Kobach to Ross. This is the Tinker to Evers to Chance of political disenfranchisement, and the conservative commitment to that exercise dates back at least as far as the fight to keep the Poll Tax, and the fight to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and it certainly includes the decision by Chief Justice John Roberts to declare the Day of Jubilee and gut that act.

Trump with Kobach Getty Images

Roberts didn’t need any coaxing, or the eventual election of Donald Trump, to do that. He’d been at that game since he was a baby lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, which also went to court to preserve the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian academies in the South. This later was the main goal of Karl Rove when he engineered the dismissal of U.S. Attorneys because they wouldn’t pursue phony voter fraud cases on behalf of the Bush White House. The Republican Party didn’t need Donald Trump to play fast and loose with the disenfranchisement of people in this country. It’s been committed to that for years.

There was a system in place that produced a John Roberts, and a Karl Rove, and a Kris Kobach, and Donald Trump didn’t create it.

I am occasionally told, and by people I respect, that I should not be too hard on the Republican apparatchiks now doing pale public penance on the cable news shows. But, without a serious reckoning with everything they did to make this president* inevitable, the deeper problems with American politics never will be solved. There was a system in place that produced a John Roberts, and a Karl Rove, and a Kris Kobach, and Donald Trump didn’t create it. It was a system that worked very well at winning elections, and the price for all that success was the prion disease that now has eaten away most of the party’s higher intellectual functions and has damaged the country’s institutions, possibly beyond repair.

These documents, and not some glowing nostalgia for Reagan-era photo ops and Mike Deaver stage design, are what conservative Republicanism always has been about: exclusion from the American experiment, and a ferocious desire to choke off any avenue of redress available to the victims of that exclusion. Apologize for that, folks, and then we can talk.

Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io