GOP’s strategy: If you can’t beat them, purge them
MIAMI – Florida Governor Rick Scott and his sorry band of Republican allies are at it once again. They are laying the groundwork for another stolen election, like in 2000, by preventing citizens who wouldn’t vote for the GOP if their life depended on it from casting their ballots.
“Scott to launch new purge of voter rolls” reads the headline to a page one story published by the Miami Herald, August 6.
Purge is a chilling word with a sad history. It’s an apt one here, however, because the perverse intent of Scott’s latest attempt to “ensure the integrity” of the election could not be more evident.
Maria Rodriguez, head of the Florida immigrant coalition, was spot-on in telling the Herald that the “state’s motive is to remove poor and minority voters who are less likely to vote Republican.”
What else could be the motive? The incidence of voter fraud in Florida and the country, as a whole, barely exceeds that of bubonic plague or leprosy. The last time the Republicans tried this they said there were hundreds of thousands of non-citizen voters. Ultimately, in the fourth largest state in the nation, they were able to identify only 98. The big problem in this country is that tens of millions of eligible voters don’t bother to do it, not that a miniscule group tries to vote fraudulently. The idea that undocumented immigrant voting is a problem is laughable: such immigrants want to stay under the radar, not put a target on their backs.
It seems a classic case of a solution chasing a non-existent problem. But make no mistake. Republican zeal responds to real problems that are increasingly facing the GOP as we move deeper into the twenty-first century.
The biggest problem is that, hey, it’s a different country out here now, with more people of color and people of all colors with surnames like Garcia, Rodriguez and Fernandez becoming potential legitimate voters every day. Confronted with this new America, Republicans could choose to adopt policies that appeal to the rising segments of the electorate and speak to them in the language of empathy and solidarity – or at least cordiality.
Instead, Republican policies, especially economic policies, systematically privilege the already very privileged, a sector of the class structure which includes very few minorities indeed. Moreover, sometimes publicly but especially in private, Republicans betray a mentality that disparages the “others” in our society. Mitt Romney’s dismissal of 47 percent of the electorate as a hopeless bunch of “takers” was notable only in that he was caught on tape saying it. It’s a mentality that is not only offensive, but deeply alienating to blacks and Latinos.
Then there is immigration. On this issue the Republican Party seems hell-bent on pushing policies that the fastest-growing sector of the electorate consider appalling, inhumane and even racist. Self-deportation, an electrified fence on the Mexican border; the Republicans are not likely to reprise these crazy ideas that cost them dearly in 2012. On the other hand they continue to try hard to deny any path to citizenship, however arduous, to more than 12 million undocumented immigrants, including those who were brought here as babes in arms.
Indeed, when Congress reconvenes in the fall, the overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives will dismember the bipartisan compromise reached in the Democratic-led Senate before the summer recess. The colossal xenophobic streak in the GOP will once again be exposed.
The rhetoric that often accompanies the GOP legislative veto of legalization, most recently Representative Steve King’s outrageous, stereotypical characterization of undocumented immigrants, often inflicts even deeper wounds than policy, wounds that are felt even by people whose ancestors were on this side of the Rio Grande long before there was a United States.
The Republican Party and African Americans parted company decades ago. The party of Lincoln bears no resemblance to the party of Gingrich, to name just one (nut) case. I was, by accident, present in a northern Virginia bookstore when Gingrich was presenting one of his books. I heard him state that with a different strategy “we” (the slaveholding South), would have won the war. So much for Lincoln.
Now the Republicans seem to be rushing headlong into following the same path with Latinos. With the high road discarded, in part because with few exceptions Republican moderates have been ridden out of the party or scared to death by the Tea Party and other fanatical anti-immigrant crackpots who decide the Republican primaries, what is left to them is to revert to the old dirty politics of disenfranchisement, albeit in more subtle ways than under Jim Crow.
Cutting early voting, requiring specific forms of voter ID, ending same-day registration, making it very difficult or impossible for ex-felons to reclaim the right to vote, these are just a few of the ways Republicans like Florida’s Rick Scott and his counterparts in several states, are trying to make up for their lack of popularity with a huge sector of the new American electorate. Unfortunately for them, the politics of voter exclusion will increase the furious blowback by minorities already engendered by the racist “Southern Strategy” and the demonization of Latinos as part of the immigration debate.
The Republicans, with their policies for the one percent and their odious rhetoric, continue to paint themselves into an ever-shrinking corner. Neither Marco Rubio nor Ted Cruz, nor even the second coming of Ronald Reagan or Harry Houdini, will help them escape from this trap of their own making.
