Why not just return to literacy tests, poll taxes and grandfather clauses? Or maybe hang "Whites only" signs outside of polling stations in African-American precincts? But I repeat myself. Republicans are essentially doing just that.
With an assist from the Republican National Committee's integrity-smothering Committee on Election Integrity, dozens of GOP state legislatures have proposed over 160 Jim Crow voting restrictions. The lawgivers are as well a conceptually prolific bunch, refabricating rusty 19th-century obstacles into slick, 21st-century containments, such as inhibiting mail-in balloting, banning drop boxes, and prohibiting election officials from disseminating even ballot applications in the absence of specific requests.
Georgia House Republicans are particularly inventive; at once unsubtle and crafty. Thursday they introduced a bill that narrows early voting on weekends to only one weekend, and likewise pares that weekend to only Saturday. Get it? No more Sunday "Souls to the Polls" voting. I haven't seen the bill, but I assume it is titled, "HR1: Get Your Christian Black Democratic Ass Out of Our Plantation."
The public GOP line is that unreasonable voting boundaries must be established because there are so damn many unreasonable voters; they believe, they actually believe, that Trump's fraud is for real, so what else can GOP lawmakers do, except compound the unreasonableness? Heaven forbid they should instead try to mitigate it.
The Washington Post reports that, in Georgia, "other" Republicans — population unknown — are rebelling against their party's new and improved Jim Crowism. They warn that effacing minorities' constitutional right to vote "will prompt a dangerous backlash from Democrats and voting advocates," thus nullifying the repressions' intent. Note they are not arguing that such measures are simply vile, unethical, and all too revoltingly characteristic of the Republican massa strain.
All the same, Republicans are on to something, I say. Verily, we must separate the undesirables from the deservingly enfranchised. But I suggest a gentler, more purposeful alternative to their ham-handed schemes aimed at skin color.
In 2017, Trump was at his enlightening best: "Most people don’t even know [Abraham Lincoln] was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that." Although a majority (55%) of respondents defied Trump's discovery by acknowledging that Lincoln was in fact a Republican, Pew Research, five years before Trump's stunning revelation, indeed found that 25 percent believed that Lincoln was a Democrat. And we know who those 25 percent were, and still are.
Begone! I say. This could be accomplished through a brief pop quiz just before the one-quarter dialectus ignoramuses vote: Pose the Enlightened One's disclosure in the form of a question. The wrong answer would instantly result in banishment.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the right kind of literacy test.