Voter Justice

I hope the announcement this past week from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland (below) means we've reached the nadir of the assault on voting rights.

Garland announced that the Justice Department will step up enforcement on voting rights in the states by scrutinizing voting laws that aim to restrict certain constituencies and challenge anything that the Justice Department finds unconstitutional and/or a threat to attempting to deny the right to vote to any eligible citizen.

"We know that expanding the ability of all eligible citizens to vote is a central pillar," Garland told the press. "That means ensuring that all eligible voters can cast a vote; that all lawful votes are counted; and that every voter has access to accurate information."

This comes as local election officials throughout the country are being harassed and intimidated by Trump supporters, and some of these local election officials have been driven into resigning from office.  Garland hopes to stem, if not stop completely, the tide of angry Trump supporters who are working in myriad of ways to rig the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential lection to ensure that the Republicans win back power in Washington with less than zero chance that Democrats ever regain it thereafter. Then we become a nominal democracy in which a white minority government controls a multiracial society like apartheid-era South Africa.  That would be the best-case scenario.  The worst-case scenario is that another pandemic or another attack on the Capitol leads to an authorization of board powers for the President - not necessarily Donald Trump but possibly Ron DeSantis or some other Trump lackey - that allow a declaration of martial law, the suspension of the Bill of Rights, the outlawing of opposition parties, and the suspension of passports, thus criminalizing emigration as well as immigration for those who wish to escape.  

And then after that, the quarter-millennial, or semiquincentennial, celebration of American independence in 2026 will ring hollow and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will recall Berlin in 1936.  

Garland is off to a goo start, and the Justice Department has a good deal of power to go after voter-suppression efforts, but it can only do so much. It could do a lot more with either voting-rights bill in Congress passed by Congress and signed by President Biden, but Republican opposition to both bills in the Senate means that Garland, like voters in states where casting a ballot will become as difficult as walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers, will have to work with what he has and figure out how to get around the obstructions. 

It's either that or we celebrate America's 250th birthday with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.