The GOP is running out of strawmen, they told us the military would never recover if we allowed, “the gays in.” The world would end if same-sex marriage ever became legal; President Obama and Bill Ayers and whomever the former President ever drank coffee with, would destroy the republic if allowed to hold the reins of power; and Mexicans are forming a revolutionary force of raping thieving immigrants. Now the new bogeyman is a predominantly peaceful religion, Islam. When do we stop fearing the ghost that the Republican Party says, will kill us in the shadows.
This has been an almost forty-year tradition for the Republican Party. From Ronald Reagan and the, “welfare queen” to George H.W. Bush and the Willie Horton campaign ads, using fear, race and division as a tactic has paid them dividends. The Democrats have had their unsavory characters as well, white separatist Governor George Wallace, of Alabama, ran for President in 1964 ’72 and ‘76 as a Democrat. He was a remnant of the ‘Dixiecrats’ who felt President Johnson abandoned southern whites by daring to give African Americans equal rights in 1964 and ‘65.
In February of 1870 the 15th Amendment prohibited the denial of Blacks to vote, The Fifteenth Amendment (Amendment XV) to the United States Constitutionprohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to votebased on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. It took until 1965 for the federal government to put teeth into that amendment. In 1971 eighteen year olds were given the right to vote, in 1974 I turned eighteen years’ old. I was ready and proud to vote for the first time. I grew up in Washington DC, the bedrock of American Democracy but I had no local control over my life. We had no voting congressional representative then or now. The Mayor had been an appointed positon by the President until the year I was eligible to vote.
So, from 1870 until 1965 no one in my immediate family had ever fully exercised the promise of, The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Now another Alabamian [Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions] who was denied a position as a federal judge because of his racist views is now set to enforce the Voting Rights Acts laws he disagrees with; who let the fox in the henhouse. Here I sit watching state after state try and enact voter restriction laws with no plausible proof that is it happening. The press and pundits dance around the inherent racism in such legislation, Republicans boil the cauldron of fraud and deceit, supposedly filled by ‘those people.’ Th truth is voter ID laws are not some imaginary safeguard, they are plain and simply new attempts at reducing the effects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At least Republicans can be honest, call for poll taxes, literacy test and guess the number of jelly beans in a jar, before you can vote. I grew up hearing Americans say, “better dead than Red.” I guess since Republicans do not mind Russian interference in our process, we can amend that to,” better to go back than Black.”
’18 and Change’