To best understand what’s happened in Georgia, let’s quote Senator Richard Russell – one of the Peach State’s 20th century “giants,” so giant in stature that the Russell Senate Office Building bears his name. He once wrote in a letter, “Any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy.”
Russell has been dead for 50 years, but his sentiment lives on. His Georgia descendants are currently giving their all, salting the festering wounds of racism with a sweeping vote suppression law that aims to turn back the hands of time to the good ole days. This law – a frontal attack on equal rights and democracy itself – is a product of white Republican panic.
Prior to the 2020 election, Republicans were already terrified that Georgia was inching ever closer to becoming a swing state, thanks to the massive voter signups among people of color. And now their worst fears have come true. The electorate’s rejection of the racist presidential incumbent, and the senatorial ascent of a Black preacher, have totally freaked them out. There’s no way they will permit those kinds of things to happen again (as if it’s their right to grant permission), hence they intend to rig the game.
When rats are cornered, they bite. These rats wear suits and ties, and their message is that the racially diverse opposition is, by definition, illegitimate. Their vote-suppression law has many noxious provisions, but the worst one targets Fulton County – home to racially diverse Atlanta, ground zero for the rising electorate of the 21st century. I won’t bore you with the law’s language; the gist is that the Republican-dominated state legislature now has the power to seize control of the county’s election procedures, especially if the GOPers “suspect” any voter fraud.
Trump’s sick mantra was that Fulton County was a hotbed of fraud (Black voters = fraud), and even though official investigators and court cases found no fraud, the fascist lie lives on in MAGA hearts and minds. Now it’s codified in the statutes. Now the white racists who run the state can step in and disqualify Fulton ballots, hold up the ballot count in their hunt for what they’ll surely call “irregularities,” and that’s not all: They’ve rigged the game to ensure longer lines on election day, and if anyone in an hours-long line is feeling poorly, it’s now a crime to give them something to drink. The new law prohibits “the giving of any…food and drink to an elector…standing in line at any polling place.”
Basically, folks, it’s legal in Georgia for a white dirtbag to get a same-day gun – but illegal for a Black voter to get a bottle of water.
This law (along with so many pending vote-suppression bills in other Republican-run states) violates the letter and spirit of the historic federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. But this racist backlash was bound to happen, because the Republican-run U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates when it watered down the VRA back in 2013.
The VRA used to be a powerful tool for racial equality; it empowered the feds to crack down on designated states that had a history of voting rights violations. Georgia was one of those designated states. Lyndon Johnson signed the VRA; one year earlier, when LBJ spoke to Congress about civil rights and declared, “We shall overcome,” Georgia’s other senator, Herman Talmadge, said that the president’s words made him “angry” and “sick.”
Flash forward to 2013. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that strong federal oversight was no longer needed, because – get this – racial disenfranchisement “is no longer the problem it once was.”
Roberts clearly needed to get out more. Sure enough, as soon as the VRA was defanged, white Republicans were duly emboldened to float vote-suppression bills in every state where they ruled the roost. And Roberts’ bizarre reasoning was fully exposed: He’d argued that racial disenfranchisement was no longer a problem because the VRA had worked; apparently he didn’t grasp that if the VRA was no longer allowed to work, that racism would flourish again. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg pointed out in her dissent, umbrellas keep us dry when it rains – which is why we don’t toss them away and get ourselves wet.
So what can be done about this? President Biden denounced the Georgia law on Friday and said that, in Washington, “We have a moral and Constitutional obligation to act.” Killing the Senate filibuster and its artificial 60-vote threshold (assuming all 50 Democrats would even agree) would clear the way for the federal voting-rights bill currently in limbo, and even if Biden were to ultimately sign it, would the Roberts court uphold it down the road? Barring a fortuitous turn of events, Richard Russell’s racist spirit lives on.
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Congratulations to my Saturday compadre, Chris Satullo, for bequeathing his journalistic DNA to his daughter. Last week, Sara Satullo and husband Nick Falsone were awarded a Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. (The prizes are named for the late Robin Toner, a New York Times political reporter.) Sara and Nick, who led a team from Lehigh Valley Live, won the prize for local reporting. Their project, “Swing County, Swing State,” delved into Northampton County’s role as one of the nation’s prime bellwether counties in presidential elections. As Chris notes, “Pretty cool result for the little girl who used to play with her dolls underneath the copy desk” while her mom edited stories.