We know their game, so let’s win it

7th November 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Tonyaa Weathersbee
Guest Columnist

It’s nothing less than a Republican pre-emptive strike.

Except this strike isn’t aimed at enemies who might blow up airplanes, but against citizens who, by penciling in a circle by a name, could continue to blow away their expectations of power and privilege.

And with barely a year to go before the 2012 presidential election, it’s time to start pre-empting their pre-emption.

The strike I’m referring to are laws that restrict voters’ access to the polls; laws that have been spreading like kudzu in states where GOP-controlled legislatures are more obsessed with denying the nation’s first Black president a second term than in dealing with issues like unemployment, foreclosures and, well, real problems that their constituents face.

The laws range from eliminating early voting on Sundays to reinstating Jim Crow-era laws that ban former felons from voting to cumbersome voter-identification requirements.

Of course, Republicans claim that it’s all about preventing voter fraud, even though there’s little to no evidence of such fraud that those laws are supposed to prevent. But that’s just a symptom of their delusions of supremacy; they believe they ought to be able to make up the facts to fit their agenda.

I’d have more respect for them if they just pulled a Mitch McConnell and came right out and said the laws are intended to oust President Obama.

Now the Brennan Center for Justice tells us that the new laws could prevent as many as five million people — mostly young, mostly Black and mostly poor — from exercising their right to vote. And that’s not hard to see; if Texas will accept a license to carry a concealed handgun as a form of voter identification but not a student ID, then that’s clearly something that’s grounded in ideology and not fairness.

Hopefully, many of those laws won’t survive a challenge under the Voting Rights Act. But there’s no time to simply wait for the Justice Department to act.

There is time, however, to ensure that some justice happens at the polls in spite of Republican attempts to suppress it.

What churches and citizens’ groups can do right now is learn what the laws are — no matter how odious and cumbersome — and look for ways to not be stymied by them.

In Florida, for example, lawmakers eliminated early voting on the Sunday before Election Day in an apparent attempt to hobble Black churches in their “get your souls to the polls” campaign.

So, right now, churches ought to make it a divine mission to get as many people as possible to the polls on the Sunday two weeks earlier. They should also step up their efforts to get their congregants to the polls on other days as well.

And this wave of oppressive voter ID laws? Democrats should begin canvassing precincts now to see who will be the most affected by it — and spend some time making voters aware of what they need to show at the polls, how to get what they need and educate them about what their rights are.

But the biggest weapon here, for Democrats and civil rights leaders and others, is to persuade those targeted for disenfranchisement to not get discouraged, but to get angry.

That’s important. Because apathy helped spawn this problem.

Throughout the country, Black turnout and youth turnout in the 2010 midterm elections was lower than it was in 2008.

If more of them had showed up to vote, chances are we now wouldn’t be battling this wave of neo-racist Tea Party Republicans who squeaked into office – and who are now suppressing their access to the ballot box.

These GOP voter suppression laws underscore an old lesson, one that says that if you don’t use your voting power to help make the laws, then others will make laws to take your power away.

Yet, at the same time, it also is a testament to the power of minorities and young people. Republicans know that these two groups hold the key to their relevancy or their obsolescence.

And seeing that they’ve worked to build an arsenal of laws aimed to keep us away from the polls, we need to start working on how to strike back – on how to get to the polls, in spite of what they’ve done.

So, let’s get on it. Now.

This article was originally published in the November 7, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper