Scott Brown outraged at prospect of poor people voting
Helping welfare recipients register to vote is the new committing voter fraud, apparently
By Alex Pareene for salon.com
Sen. Scott Brown — Massachusetts moderate — has just released one of the most brazen anti-franchise statements I’ve seen from a prominent Republican this year. Apparently the daughter of his challenger, Elizabeth Warren, is the chairwoman of one of a few voting rights groups contracted by the state of Massachuetts to send voter registration forms to people who weren’t offered the chance to register when they applied to receive welfare benefits. That was a violation of federal law, and Massachusetts is sending these people registration forms as part of a legal settlement. And this makes Scott Brown really mad, because if you help welfare recipients vote, they’ll vote against Scott Brown, probably.
I want every legal vote to count, but it’s outrageous to use taxpayer dollars to register welfare recipients as part of a special effort to boost one political party over another. This effort to sign up welfare recipients is being aided by Elizabeth Warren’s daughter and it’s clearly designed to benefit her mother’s political campaign. It means that I’m going to have to work that much harder to get out my pro-jobs, pro-free enterprise message.
It’s actually a “special effort” to comport with federal law, as I said, but the fact that helping legally qualified citizens register to vote is now considered improper is startling. Or at least that a non-insane Republican said as much out loud is startling. This goes beyond phony accusations of voter fraud: Brown is outraged that his opponent’s daughter is working for an organization making it easier for people to legally vote. Because they’re poor.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/09/scott_brown_outraged_at_prospect_of_poor_people_voting/
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I also believe in taking collective responsibility and speaking out against the new voting suppression moves, some of which appear clearly aimed against black folk, in the early voting periods that allow church groups to assist in taking "souls to the polls".
Besides not having the correct identification required under new onerous procedures ("poll taxes"
, many elderly people are unable to get around on the poor public transportation systems both in the urban centers and the rural areas, where they may be non existent. Remember that such buses and the like may not even be available on Election Day, or run on greatly reduced "holiday" schedules. We all need now to plan accordingly to encourage people to get out and vote.
Hispanics are already intimidated by law enforcement and language barriers in some states or have become apathetic enough by false promises on immigration reform so that their increasing power as a voting bloc is already diminished instead of growing. Young people may be included in the apathetic group, and now disheartened as well, lacking in the idealism that was displayed so prominently in 2008, even beginning to consider nihilism.
These are not simply tactics, they're really being legislated into American law and therefore lay claim to the lame defense of "states' rights". But that's precisely what the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and it's subsequent extensions of Section 5 is designed to protect us from.
It now appears that we need the protection more than ever before, and in more states than originally intended, which is so sad, with the Republican party trying to drag us back to pre-Civil Rights Movement times, and even to earlier centuries in terms of women's reproductive rights. You can also intuitively feel that this is the real reason why the Republicans were clumsily going after our Attorney General Holder in a transparently false witch hunt, resulting in the congressional equivalent of a legal lynching holding him in contempt. It's no accident that he was picked to be made an example of the showing of Teapublican legislative power in an attempt to intimidate all those who oppose them.
It's also hauntingly ironic that AG Holder's sister in law Vivian Malone Jones was one of two African American women who were initially blocked from enrolling in the University of Alabama even when accompanied by Deputy AG Katzenbach with Governor Wallace standing in the doorway like some mad pit bull. Gov. Wallace then made a speech about States' sovereignty on the steps of that institution of learning, but had to stand aside when the Federalized Alabama National Guard escorted her back to the school, where she completed her degree, and again ironically enough became employed by the DOJ Division of Civil Rights. AG Holder also began his legal career at the DOJ.
Further irony that infuriates me is that AG Eric Holder, like General Colin Powell, is also from the Bronx, and of West Indian heritage. That's just me, having been a resident of that borough as well as all the others including right on the street where the West Indian Festival is held in Brooklyn. We should be celebrating these figures as role models, not censuring them time after time.
I will not quote Santayana again, but my import is similar.
