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Conservatives never did embrace voting rights for women and minorities. Paul Weyrich said it back in the 1980’s. The more people vote, the worse Republicans do in elections.

When the Tea Party’s Judson Phillips said that restricting the vote to property owners is a “wise idea” he was simply restating the general thrust of Paul Weyrich’s sentiments.

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First they combined gerrymandering with rigged and faulty voting machines.

Vote suppression reached a level of intensity unseen since Jim Crow after the 2008 presidential election.

As my colleague Dennis S. observed, Conservatives never could lose graciously. The very notion of Americans rejecting Sarah Palin aka God’s gift to Birchers was just too much for them to take. So rather than long for the good old days when voting was a privilege bestowed on propertied white men, state Republicans decided enough is enough. They are going to get your votes my pretties, and your ability to register too.

Of course, they underestimated our intelligence,when they claimed that vote suppression was the solution to the statistically non-existent problem of voter fraud.

Their best efforts backfired big time. In 2012, voters braved all that the Tea Party Republicans dished out and re-elected Barack Obama.

Since then, the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the pre-clearance formula in the Voting Rights Act and the right wing went to town passing laws that courts had previously ruled unconstitutional.

The excuse du jour for vote suppression is it’s just another form of gerrymandering.

Some admit, with pride, that suppressing votes gives Republicans an electoral advantage In the Tea Republlican logic, if it’s about electoral advantage, then it can’t be about racism.

In response to the DOJ’s challenge of Texas’s redistricting plan and voter ID laws, Attorney-General, Gregg Abbott admitted what we already know. Republicans want to suppress votes by racial minorities because that’s the only chance they’ve got at winning elections . Evidently, even that’s not enough suppression because Abbot wants to target women too. But hey, no racism was intended and no sexism intended. This is just good old fashioned gerrymandering.

In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.6 It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates. …. The redistricting decisions of which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations, Last year, Abbott claimed the purpose of ID laws was to stop voter fraud. But the absence of evidence to support that excuse meant he had to come up with another reason to tell the courts.

This year, it’s just about party politics as usual. The fact that voter ID laws disproportionately affect racial minorities is merely coincidence. It’s about the fact that “those people” keep voting Democrat so that they can get free stuff. If they voted Republican instead of the “food stamp” President, Republicans wouldn’t need to suppress their votes.

In reality, Republicans are trying to hold our votes for ransom just as they tried to hold the government and the economy for ransom because things didn’t go their way.

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