PRESIDENT BIDEN AND STACY ABRAMS, Georgia's failed gubernatorial candidate, are running away with a voting narrative which has nothing to do with reality. It says that Georgia's new voting law---making it easier to vote legally but harder to cheat---is going to bring back Jim Crow on steroids, or Jim Crow 2.0. Really? Have these people forgotten history, or is this all a willful act to take advantage of gullible, uneducated or easily manipulated or frightened voters for their political gain? It's a rhetorical question.
History bears repeating that the Republican party was founded by Horace Greeley and others in 1854 for the express purpose of preventing the spread of slavery into free states and outlying territories. In 1857, Roger Taney, a Jacksonian Democrat, handed down the infamous and highly controversial Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court saying slaves or freed slaves were in essence sub-human and could neither be free citizens of our country nor have standing to redress in any U.S. court of law. Subsequently, Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican candidate, was elected president in 1860 and soon after, southern Democratic states commenced to secede from the Union. In 1863, Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation which effectively freed slaves in the Confederate states and charted the course for freeing all slaves in the embattled United States.
After the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865 and the horrific assassination of President Lincoln by a racist Confederate sympathizer, Reconstruction began tepidly under the ineffective and unpopular President Andrew Johnson, another Jacksonian Democrat.
But in 1869, President Ulysses S Grant, a Republican, was elected and began in earnest Reconstruction----to redress the horrific inequities of slavery and to admit slave states back into the Union. Grant's mission was an uphill battle, thwarted at every turn by southern racist Democrats.
Reconstruction took precedence during Grant's two terms of office. But the Democratic Ku Klux Klan caused widespread violence throughout the South against African Americans. By 1870, all former Confederate states had been readmitted into the United States and were represented in Congress. However Democrats, or former slave owners, violently refused to accept that freedmen were citizens, who were granted suffrage by the Fifteenth Amendment. By 1871 Klan activity was becoming out of control, while Grant and Congress created the Department of Justice and had passed three Force Acts. Grant and his Attorney General Amos T. Akerman began a crackdown on Klan in the South, starting in South Carolina, making arrests and convictions, causing the Klan to demobilize and ensuring a fair election for 1872..... Then came the Jim Crow laws, again enacted by southern Democrats who refused to accept that blacks were free, could vote and had equal protection under the law. Over the next 20 years, blacks would lose almost all they had gained.
Worse, denial of their rights and freedoms would be made legal by a series of racist statutes, the Jim Crow laws. “Jim Crow” was a derisive slang term for a black man. It came to mean any state law passed in the South that established different rules for blacks and whites. Jim Crow laws were based on the theory of white supremacy and were a reaction to Reconstruction. In the depression-racked 1890s, racism appealed to whites who feared losing their jobs to blacks. Politicians abused blacks to win the votes of poor white “crackers.” Newspapers fed the bias of white readers by playing up (sometimes even making up) black crimes. In 1890, in spite of its 16 black members, the Louisiana General Assembly passed a law to prevent black and white people from riding together on railroads. Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging the law, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. Upholding the law, the court said that public facilities for blacks and whites could be “separate but equal.” Soon, throughout the South, they had to be separate. Two years later, the court seemed to seal the fate of black Americans when it upheld a Mississippi law designed to deny black men the vote. Given the green light, Southern states began to limit the voting right to those who owned property or could read well, to those whose grandfathers had been able to vote, to those with “good characters,” to those who paid poll taxes. In 1896, Louisiana had 130,334 registered black voters. Eight years later, only 1,342, 1 percent, could pass the state’s new rules. Jim Crow laws touched every part of life. In South Carolina, black and white textile workers could not work in the same room, enter through the same door, or gaze out of the same window. Many industries wouldn’t hire blacks: Many unions passed rules to exclude them......
To recap, while the Republican Party of old has historically fought to free slaves and give them equal rights under the law, Democrats have opposed this tooth and nail. And even with this, Democrats have been allowed to promulgate a false narrative that they are the party that is looking out for blacks. That is only true is you consider infantilizing them, getting them hooked on government assistance and telling them what to think and do counts as 'help.'
Now today President Biden and Stacy Abrams insult blacks by calling new voting laws Jim Crow 2.0 with a straight face. Scandalous. Ineffective. And won't work.....
Which brings us back to Jonathan Turley's most recent column:
Jonathan Turley: Justice or Just Deserts? Trump, Cosby and Georgia Cases Show Rising Cost of Political Litigation
Below is my (Turley's) column in the Hill on a series of cases that appear propelled by political rather than legal considerations. The costs to the legal system, the public, or victims in such cases are often overlooked but they are considerable.....
Skipping ahead to the Justice Department's lawsuit against the ill advised new Georgia Voting law, Turley writes:
The Georgia lawsuit Last week, the Biden administration surprised many observers by filing a civil rights action against the state of Georgia over its recent election reforms. The lawsuit was less surprising than its timing: It was filed just days before the release of Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, an Arizona case in which the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the very statutory provision (Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act) being used as the basis in the Georgia challenge. The Biden administration has made opposition to Georgia’s law into a rallying cry for its stalled legislative efforts to federalize state election laws. The problem is that President Biden has been long on rhetoric and short on facts in denouncing the law as “Jim Crow on steroids.” The Washington Post awarded him four “Pinocchios” for his characterization of the law, including the false claim that it reduces the hours for voting; the law actually does the opposite. Likewise, Biden falsely claimed Georgia’s law prevents voters in line at polling places from getting water. Georgia was responding to complaints that campaigns circumvent rules barring politicking around polling places by giving food and drinks to voters in line; the law allows “self-service water from an unattended receptacle.” On these and other provisions, Georgia’s law has considerable overlap with provisions in other states. In its 6-3 decision upholding Arizona’s election rules, including a bar on vote “harvesting,” the Supreme Court rejected presumptions of racial discrimination due to partisan objectives. Justice Samuel Alito declared “partisan motives are not the same as racial motives.” The ruling builds on earlier cases limiting the reach and meaning of the Voting Rights Act. The new Georgia challenge takes a considerable risk of magnifying these losses in court. The legal cost of this ill-considered move could be immense. Important questions are being raised about the impact of some laws on minority votes. Yet the attack on Georgia’s law is a poor choice, despite Biden going “all in” on the narrative, because it locks the administration into proving a weak case. While the court declined to issue a sweeping new standard for all Section 2 voting rights cases, this case could open the door for precisely that type of ruling. The Biden administration — which has lost a remarkably high number of legal cases in its first year — is likely to lose this one, too, before the next presidential election. Politically motivated cases like these impose costs that are rarely paid by those who bring them. The more a prosecutor feels it necessary to repeat that “It’s not about politics,” the more likely a case is entirely political.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. You can find his updates on Twitter @JonathanTurley.....
If these voter laws assuring voter integrity that the feckless, dishonest Biden and Abrams are whining about sound like Jim Crow 2.0, then I have a poppy farm in the Arctic I'd like to sell you....We must push back against this utter nonsense. We cannot let these people win this.
As today's battered and rudderless national Republican party attempts to redefine itself into a more principled, vigorous organization that represents real conservative values, let us hope that voter integrity and voter ID laws in every state are at the top of its to-do list.
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