Block the Vote - 2021 Edition, Part Two

The New York Times had a report recently about how the Democrats have two chances to defeat Republican voter suppression laws in the states through the courts and through legislation, and those two chances are slim and fat.  Boiling it all down, the report explained how Democrats are outvoted in the state legislatures and cannot stop the voter-suppression juggernaut.  But fighting voter suppression through lawsuits is even more of a lost cause, as the suits take forever to go through the system and may not be ruled upon until December 2022 at the earliest - one month too late to give the Democrats a fighting chance in the midterms. And even the very idea that they could actually win any of these suits is in doubt, as the new voter-restriction laws - ostensibly designed to combat voter fraud - is dubious, because the laws have been so carefully worded that an accusation that they're designed to suppress Democratic constituencies could be seen as a smack-talking partisan exercise . . . and a charge that's very hard to prove. 

Democratic efforts to move a voting rights bill - passed by the U.S. House - out of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee are stuck in neutral thanks to Republican opposition to it and one Democrat - Joe Manchin West Virginia, of course - who has concerns about how the law would affect rural states like his own.  (Once again, time to bash Democrats Sara Gideon in Maine and Cal Cunningham in North Carolina for losing the least losable U.S. Senate elections of 2020 and making Manchin's position in the catbird seat possible!)  Democrats find themselves negotiating with Manchin to get him to back the bill by making changes to please him.  In that case, it goes back to the House, where Madame DeFarge - also known as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - and buddies of hers such as potty-mouthed Rashida Tlaib will object to the changes made in the Senate.  And so on and so on.

Baring a miracle, it looks like Republicans will easily keep these changes in state voting laws in place to enable them to win back Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024 - and we'll have a situation in which Democrats become a permanent minority even as Republicans are sustained by a minority of the country because the electorate will be too narrow and too exclusionary.  Oh, Democrats might get a bone thrown at them every now and then in the form of bipartisan legislation in the form of an earned-income tax credit and a Cesar Chavez monument on the National Mall in Washington, but things like universal health care, bullet trains for Amtrak - yeah, they won't get any of that.  And they'll only be able to speak . . . when spoken to.  In other words, we'll have a fake democracy that restricts a more liberal and more nonwhite segment of the population from participating in the governmental process.

Thank you for talkin' to me South Africa!

Yes, as Thomas Hobbes once said, life is "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and in America that goes double. 😠