[ The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial
democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote,
and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an extreme
white minority has unchecked control over everyone else.]
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AMERICA’S COLD CIVIL WAR  
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David A. Love
May 15, 2023
LA Progressive
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_ The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial
democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote,
and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an extreme
white minority has unchecked control over everyone else. _

, DonkeyHotey • Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 2.0) Flickr

 

In the US, the right-wing voter suppression efforts reached a level
not seen since the era of segregation, when white supremacists in the
South had passed laws to deny Black Americans the right to vote and
threatened everyone who dared to resist with violence.

The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial
democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote
and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an
extremist white minority has unchecked control over everyone else. The
latter group is represented by the Republican Party, which is brazenly
waging a cold civil war by pushing for unprecedented voter suppression
measures targeting minority and marginalized communities.

In response to the Democratic Party’s victory in the 2020
presidential and congressional elections, Republican-controlled state
legislatures have proposed 253 bills in 43 states that aim to prevent
millions of Americans, and especially Americans of colour, from voting
in federal and state elections.

In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp signed a law on March 25 that will,
among other things, curtail early voting, shorten the length of runoff
elections – such as the two Georgia Senate runoff elections in the
past election cycle that allowed the Democrats to control the Senate
– and make it a crime to provide food or water to people waiting in
line to vote. In predominantly Black and Brown Georgia communities,
voters waited in line for up to eight hours in the 2020 elections, so
these new measures could leave thousands of them unable or unwilling
to vote in future elections.

The law also makes producing a photo ID mandatory for absentee voting
and gives the Republican-controlled state legislature more control
over the administration of elections. According to critics, by
expanding the state legislature’s influence over the election
process, and making it easier for them to remove state and local
election officials refusing to collaborate with them, the law makes it
easier for the Republicans to overturn legitimate election results
that are not favorable to their party and agenda.

Similarly, Florida Republicans are pushing for perplexing voting
restrictions, which are trying to fix “problems” that do not
exist. Senate Bill 90, the main vehicle for Republican-led voter
suppression in the state, for example, proposes to ban the use of
ballot drop boxes, to prohibit anyone other than an immediate family
member from helping a voter return a mail-in ballot, and to make a
request for a mail-in ballot valid for only one election cycle instead
of two. Republicans claim all these measures are necessary to prevent
election fraud, even though they themselves admit that none of these
has ever caused any significant irregularities in voting in past
elections. If this bill becomes law, however, it is clear that it
would disfranchise many Black and other minority voters, and give the
Republicans an advantage.

In Wisconsin, whose prior voter suppression measures have impacted
Black and student voters in urban areas, the Republicans are floating
a bill that would change requirements for indefinitely confined
voters, institute stricter voter ID laws, and bar election funding
from private organizations, among a variety of other things.

In Texas, once again under the guise of protecting “election
integrity”, bills have been proposed to increase the use of “poll
watchers” – something that raises the spectre of state-sanctioned
voter intimidation. These bills also aim to limit mail-in and curbside
voting, restrict officials from offering unsolicited ballots and
require people with disabilities to produce a note from a doctor or a
government agency to vote absentee – measures that would
disproportionately affect voters who are more likely to vote against
the Republicans.

In Arizona, a Republican lawmaker, Shawnna Bolick, introduced a bill
that grants the legislature the ability to revoke the secretary of
state’s certification of the presidential election results at any
time before the inauguration of a new president. Democratic lawmakers
said if the Republican legislature passes the bill, they will work to
defeat it by public referendum. The state already has laws in place
that restrict minority communities’ ability to vote. The Democrats
already took two voting provisions – a policy that requires an
entire ballot to be thrown out if the ballot was cast at the wrong
precinct, and a state law that bans the collection of ballots by third
parties, sometimes called “ballot harvesting” – to the Supreme
Court claiming that they discriminate against racial minorities in the
state.

Iowa, too, enacted a law to preserve “election integrity” and
combat election fraud, despite no widespread election fraud being
witnessed in the state in recent history. The law reduces the early
voting period from 29 days to 20 days, closes polling sites at 8pm
rather than 9pm, and requires that mail-in ballots are received by
Election Day, rather than postmarked by that day. And voters who do
not vote in a single election are purged from the voter roll if they
fail to reregister or report a change of address.

Only federal intervention can stem this tide of voter suppression and
thwart the efforts of numerous states to undermine the electoral
process and democracy.

The Democrats in Congress are already pushing for a federal voting
rights bill that would expand federal control of local election rules.

The For the People Act aims to introduce universal same-day and
automatic voter registration, ease voter ID requirements and expand
voting by mail and early voting. The act would also end the
gerrymandering of congressional districts, and reform campaign finance
and government ethics laws. Another bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights
Advancement Act – named after the late civil rights leader and
member of Congress – will restore the Voting Rights Act and combat
voter suppression and racially discriminatory election laws. “We are
witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights
unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era. This is Jim Crow
in new clothes,” said the recently elected Senator Raphael Warnock
of Georgia, while urging his colleagues to pass this legislation.

Endangering the passage of this crucial bill are the antiquated,
undemocratic rules and structures of the US Senate, which amplify the
power of rural, less populous and former slaveholding states.

Specifically, a senate rule called the filibuster, which requires 60
votes rather than a simple majority to pass legislation, is being used
by the Republicans to block Democratic efforts to prevent state-level
voter suppression. In the past, this rule was used by white
supremacist lawmakers to uphold slavery and racial segregation, deny
the rights of Black Americans and block anti-lynching laws. Now it is
the most efficient tool they have to stop the Biden administration
from passing the For The People Act. Democrats must change this rule
if they have any chance of implementing a pro-democracy, pro-voting
rights agenda. President Joe Biden recently lambasted the filibuster
and depicted it as a relic of the Jim Crow era in the once-segregated
South. Yet it is still not clear whether he will be able to annul this
rule.

Republicans are intent on holding on to power at all costs, like the
Afrikaners in apartheid South Africa. The former party of Abraham
Lincoln and emancipation has decided that the best way of dealing with
the country’s changing demographics and the growing rejection of
their core policies is to deny basic citizenship rights to large
swaths of the population. And they are not even trying to hide the
fact that they only want a specific subset of Americans, who support
them and their discriminatory policies, to have a say on the
country’s future.

Earlier this month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, for example, criticized
Democratic efforts to expand access to voting by baselessly claiming
that such moves would provide voting rights to “illegal aliens”
and “child molesters”. He then revealed the real reason behind his
objection: If that happens, he said “[the Democrats] will win and
maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate and of
the state legislatures for the next century.”

Around the same time, in a Supreme Court hearing on Arizona voting
restrictions
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a lawyer representing the Arizona Republican Party explained why the
suppression measures are necessary. “Because it puts us at a
competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said lawyer Michael
Carvin. “Politics is a zero-sum game. And every extra vote they get
through unlawful interpretation of Section 2 hurts us, it’s the
difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election 51
to 50.”

America travelled down this dangerous path before.

There were hopes for the establishment of multiracial democracy in
America in the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. In 1868, only three
years after the end of the Civil war, South Carolina became the first
US state to have a majority-Black state legislature. By 1877, when
Reconstruction ended, it is estimated that as many as 2,000 Black men
were holding public office across the country. But the country did not
remain on this promising path for too long.

White supremacists swiftly retook control of the South through the
anti-Black domestic terror, lynchings and assassinations of Black
political leaders, and voter suppression laws including poll taxes and
literacy tests. In some states, in order to vote, Black people had to
answer ridiculous questions like how many bubbles were on a bar of
soap or how many jelly beans were in a jar. Black people were denied
the right to vote in the South until the civil rights movement led to
the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Now, the US is repeating the mistakes of history. A right-wing mob
tried to take over the US Capitol and deny the winner of a legitimate
and just election the presidency. They failed, but now their lawmaker
allies are trying to overturn the will of the people through
legislation and deny millions of Americans the right to vote. The
future of America is at stake.

_DAVID A. LOVE, JD, is the Executive Editor of BlackCommentator
[[link removed]]. He is a lawyer and
journalist based in Philadelphia, and a contributor to the Progressive
Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service, In These Times and
Philadelphia Independent Media Center. He contributed to the book,
States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin's
Press, 2000). His blog is davidalove.com._

* US Civil War
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* Cold War
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* Racism
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