Season's Trickings

It's fitting that Halloween comes so close to elections.

Sure, it must have been haints: that would explain why 40,000 voter registration forms vanished so thoroughly, Georgia's Secretary of State (R) couldn't find 'em. Charles Pierce, on that and other tricks—past, present, and always under improvement for the future.

Earlier in the month, Pierce wrote of the Supreme Court majority—

... One of the things it really wants to do is open the political system to the new Gilded Age of corporate oligarchy. One of the other things they really want to do is block off any avenue of political resistance to that goal, particularly at the ballot box. They really are dedicated to restricting the franchise as much as they can, and to allowing the states to do whatever they want in furtherance of that purpose. I was in the courtroom when the case of Shelby County v. Holder was argued, and when Antonin Scalia said voting was a "privilege," and John Roberts himself declared that the Day Of Jubilee had come, and race was no longer a factor. The longer in time I get away from that morning, the more absurd those arguments seem. But they prevailed, and the majority that supported them meant business. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, and it has strongly resisted any attempt either to bring the VRA back, or any attempt to work around their ruling in the Shelby County case.

Yesterday, that majority essentially endorsed the most restrictive voter-suppression act passed since the (alleged) demise of the poll-tax. Back in July of 2013, the legislature of the newly insane state of North Carolina passed a law that essentially demolished every attempt to extend the franchise. It was this law that fired up the Moral Monday movement, and brought to prominence the Reverend William Barber, who saw the snake-line getting ever higher and more inaccessible. Over this past summer, the fight against the law went into the courts, and the people opposed to the law won an important partial victory when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated both same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting, two of the most important restrictions provided for in the law. Then, Wednesday night, without comment, the Nine Wise Souls issued a stay of the Fourth Circuit's order, thereby reinstating the restrictions that the circuit court had overturned....

Just in time to restrict NC voting access in this election, and to reward this effort by presumably sending him to the Senate.

The Court's decision is a routine day's work in the long game. Endorsed by bi-partisan consensus, with only Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting.

Pierce—

There is a long, blue river of sadness running through the words of that dissent. It runs under the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama. It pools into a lagoon of sadness behind an earthen dam in Mississippi. The survivors of the generation that fought and bled for the right to vote are getting old and dying off right now. John Lewis is 74. Soon, there won't be any of them left. But it always was thought that the victories they won would survive them. That the real monument to their cause would be lines of the historically disenfranchised suddenly empowered, swamping the system, and realizing that elections in this country are meant to be the most powerful form of civil disobedience there is. And now, it looks very much as though powerful interests are in combination to make sure their victories die with them, here as we celebrate John Roberts's Day of Jubilee. There is a long blue river of sadness running through those words, and a darkness spreading across its surface, and a long night is falling on the face of the water.