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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsVoter Suppression Is Deeply Embedded in the Republican Party. Brett Kavanaugh Helped Put It There.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23585673/voter-suppression-republican-brett-kavanaugh-don-mcgahn/Voter Suppression Is Deeply Embedded in the Republican Party. Brett Kavanaugh Helped Put It There.
So did Don McGahn. There's a reason one is shepherding the other onto the Supreme Court.
By Charles P. Pierce
Oct 3, 2018
I had forgotten until very recently that, prior to his assuming Michael Cohen's old job as this administration's king fixer, Don McGahn had been a member of the Federal Election Commission from 2008 to 2013. This was one of the last appointments that C-Plus Augustus made before leaving office, and it had some of the most lasting repercussions, some of which are still shaking the ground under our democratic institutions to this day.
You have to remember that the second Bush Administration remained unshakably paranoid about the dubious way it had been installed in office. At least throughout its first term, and certainly in the days before the 9/11 attacks threw everything up in the air, it had an entirely justified concern about its fundamental legitimacy. Then, along came 2008 and Barack Obama's improbable rise, which was generated by a deluge of authentic political enthusiasm that swamped the political system, much of it coming from people whom the Republicans would rather not see at the polls, thank you very much.
It was this combination of factorsa failed presidency installed illegitimately combined with a spectacular reaction after eight years of failurethat fully embedded voter suppression into the Republican Party as a fundamental characteristic. It had rendered itself incapable of reaching the new voters that had powered the Obama campaign, so it determined, root and branch, to make it as hard as possible for any Democratic candidate to replicate that dynamic.
I would argue that the judicial end of this party-wide commitment to an assault on the franchise can be encompassed by the three Supreme Court decisionsCitizens United, Shelby County, and McCutcheonthrough which the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement were shredded right along with any sensible campaign-finance laws. We traded John Lewis for the Koch Brothers. Which is where Don McGahn came in. He was the vehicle through which this strategy was implemented at the FEC
As this Quartz report demonstrates, McGahn's primary task at the FEC was to break down the country's system of elections.
And now, of course, McGahn's portfolio in the White House includes sliding judicial nominees through the processa job Brett Kavanaugh once held in the previous Republican administration. Kavanaugh, as you may have surmised, is awful on campaign-finance reform and just as bad on voting rights.
The entire Republican project ever since the Florida burglary of 2000in which Kavanaugh was an accessory after the facthas been to find a way to hang onto power while the party itself is shrinking down to an old, white, Southern base. Every institution of government that the Republicans have controlled for nearly 20 years has been tasked with this, and now they pretty much control all of them, at least until the first week of November. Brett Kavanaugh has been at the center of those efforts. So has Don McGahn. This is the part of the tale that is not about the president* at all.
BigmanPigman
(51,627 posts)From Newt to the Tea Party to McConnell it has been a coup of our democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/opinion/the-american-civil-war-part-ii.html
"It would be easy to blame both sides equally for this shift, noted Ornstein, but it is just not true. After the end of the Cold War, he said, tribal politics were introduced by Newt Gingrich when he came to Congress 40 years ago, and then perfected by Mitch McConnell during the Barack Obama presidency, when McConnell declared his intention to use his G.O.P. Senate caucus to make Obama fail as a strategy for getting Republicans back in power."
Bfd
(1,406 posts)It is a necessary part of our political history, to be told at this critical moment
Thanks
Gothmog
(145,554 posts)For example Rehnquist got his start in GOP politics as part of a GOP goon squad challenging non-white voters in Arizona See https://www.democraticunderground.com/12511559803#post5 Look up GOP ballot security efforts and the DNC v. RNC consent decree. Here is a great quote from the founder of ALEC and the Heritage Foundation