“Stop the Steal” didn't start with Trump, Jamelle Bouie reminds us. In a New York Times featured opinion piece, Bouie informs us, once again, that the cancer metastasizing upon the body politic in the form of the conservative/republican cum fascist movement predates tRUMP by decades.
We are all familiar with the history of Tammany Hall and the 19th century shenanigans of the well oiled Democratic machine. But what is lost in our collective misunderstandings is that Republican machines in Philadelphia and elsewhere were just as outrageous. That aside, Bouie reminds us that “Conservative belief in pervasive voter fraud goes back decades—and rests on racist and nativist tropes that date back to Reconstruction in the South and Tammany Hall in the North—but the modern obsession with fraud dates back to the 2000 election. That year, Republicans blamed Democratic fraud for narrow defeats in New Mexico, which George W. Bush lost by just a few hundred votes, and Missouri, where the incumbent senator, John Ashcroft, lost his re-election to a dead man.
“Ashcroft's opponent, Mel Carnahan, was killed three weeks earlier in a plane crash, but his name was still on the ballot, with his wife running in his stead. Shocked Republicans blamed Ashcroft's defeat on fraud. At Ashcroft's election-night party, the state's senior Republican senator, Kit Bond, said 'Democrats in the city of St. Louis are trying to steal this election.
“In 2001, as the newly minted attorney general under President George W. Bush, Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud. 'America has failed too often to uphold the right of every citizen's vote, once cast, to be counted fairly and equally,' he said at a news conference that March:
“Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed. The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up on Election Day.
“The Republican National Committee supported this push, claiming to have evidence that thousands of voters cast more than one ballot in the same election” (1)
One may recall the
long-forgotten war against ACORN, an organization formed in the
sixties which by the mid to late 70's had become a formidable
advocate for neighborhood associations. Urban oriented, it was a
force in local politics in cities nationwide. Among its many
functions was voter registration in order to give low income and the
politically disconnected a voice. A prime target for a movement
that represents the top 10 percent, if not the top 1 percent or the
top one tenth of one percent. You can't win anything like a majority if people like these show up at the polls and cast ballots in order
to defend their own economic interests.
Here's Bouie recalling the history: As the 2004 “got underway” “Swing-state
Republicans accused the group of 'manufacturing voters,' and federal
prosecutors looked, unsuccessfully, for evidence of wrongdoing.
Later, Karl Rove would press President Bush's second attorney general
Alberto Gonzales, to fire a number of U.S. attorneys for failure to
investigate voter fraud allegations....
“ACORN and voter fraud would remain a bete noire for Republicans for the rest of the decade. Conservative advocacy groups and media organizations produced a steady stream of anti-ACORN material and, as the 2008 election campaign heated up, did everything they could to tie Democratic candidates, and Barack Obama in particular, to a group they portrayed as radical and dangerous. ACORN, Rush Limbaugh said in one characteristic segment, has 'been training young Black kids to hate, hate, hate this country.
“During the second debate with Obama, a few weeks before the election, the Republican nominee, John McCain, charged that ACORN 'is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy'”. (2)
Devoting much of the final weeks of his 2008 campaign to the false charge, McCain “accused Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party of orchestrating a vast conspiracy of fraud. 'We've always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn't know how far their allies would go,' one mailer read. 'The Obama-supported, far left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter-registration fraud in a number of battleground states.” (3)
Sound familiar? Smear community-action groups, labeling them 'far left' for the sin of registering voters, organizing food banks, and generally helping poor people. Attack Democratic precincts, looking for fraud, areas that are heavily Black and Latino, but also poor white. De-legitimize the opposition and, by extension, the legitimacy of the Republic itself if it is in the service of unlimited political expedience.
It is worth noting that the first casualty of the 'tea-bagger' takeover of the House. “It closed its doors in 2010 after Congress stripped it of federal funding in the aftermath of a scandal stoked by right-wing provocateurs, whose accusations have since been discredited.” (4) The disciples of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove had done their work; and Obama, a former community organizer—one who surely recognized the importance of ACORN to the communities—did not, to his eternal discredit, raise a finger to save it.
Then came the conservative Supreme Court rulings gutting the voting rights act, destroying campaign finance laws with the ridiculous Citizen's United decision in which corporations, being deemed real persons, could not be restricted in their campaign activity. Before the ink was dry, states began passing, by 2011, restrictive voter laws, closing polling places, making voter registration drives much more difficult.
“The absence of any evidence for voter fraud was not, for Republicans, evidence of its absence. Feed by the Supreme Court's ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended federal 'preclearance' of election laws in much of the South, Republican lawmakers passed still more voter restrictions, each justified as necessary measures in the war against fraud.” (5)
The suppression of the vote to keep conservatives in power had a long and sorry history in this county. It, along with terrorist groups like the KK K, were and are the tools employed to keep hold of power. The only difference is that the means and ends have changed party affiliation. Our Caesar Disgustus simply made use of them.
“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Convict and Imprison.
___________
Bouie, Jamelle. “'Stop the Steal' Didn't Start With Trump” The New York Times. Saturday, January 16, 2021. Page A18
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
Ibid
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