President Donald Trump’s audacity apparently knows no bounds.
In a recent tweet, he threatened to withhold federal funding, amid a global pandemic no less, if Michigan did not cease its call to send out mail-in ballots to all of its 7.7 million residents so that, in the words of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”
The first thing that needs to be said is that, even if Trump doesn’t like the decision — it was issued from a Democrat, so, of course, it would raise his ire — there is nothing illegal about a state mailing out absentee ballots to its own residents. That is lie No. 1. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a “no excuse” constitutional amendment to allow any resident to apply for an absentee ballot for any reason.
Trump’s tweet, which has been liked by more than 120,000 people at present, includes two other falsehoods.
Lie No. 2 is that Michigan’s move has anything at all to do with an attempt at voter fraud. Trump has pushed this dishonest claim repeatedly, but it’s well-documented at this point that, while voting in person is obviously more secure than mail-in ballots, cases of absentee fraud have been few and far between. Michigan’s decision is about ensuring that people stay safe during the virus outbreak while being allowed to participate in one of this nation’s most cherished, and important, democratic processes.
Trump also suggested that he has the power to withhold state funding. He almost certainly does not. That might have been true if this was an authoritative regime, and I’m sure some of the people in power would like to quietly move us in that direction and give Trump all manner of unconstitutional privileges, but here in this democracy, the executive can’t simply invent powers. As The New York Times notes, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, issued under President Richard Nixon, requires the chief executive to get approval from Congress before any money is withheld. In any case, a lot of the recently approved funding to states has already been released.
Trump also threatened, in a similar fashion, to withhold money from Nevada.
Cutting a state’s funding because they don’t do your bidding would be illegal. By threatening to do so, as Greg Sargent, with The Washington Post said, the president is “abusing his office and betraying the national interest.” Not only would Trump’s threat be illegal if put into action, it’s also undemocratic. Not that either of these bother the president.
Trump knows that in the upcoming election, he might be in trouble in Michigan. Attempts to prevent more people from voting is a tried and true part of the GOP toolkit. Current conservative strategies for limiting votes or asserting more influence in elections, including new restrictive laws and gerrymandering, are certainly more subtle in the 21st century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are designed to achieve the same result. Republicans, and conservatives throughout American history, have long known that if they can somehow suppress votes, they have a better chance of winning. And why is that? Because conservatives have historically protected the interests of the few — the privileged and the well-connected (and usually white) — to the detriment of the many, including blue collar workers, immigrants, low-income families and those in the inner city.
Trump and his Republican cohorts know very well that the more they can suppress certain voters, the better chance they have of remaining in power. The president even admitted it. During an episode of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News, Trump was talking about measures that were proposed by Democrats to increase the number of people who could vote during the pandemic:
“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
And in November 2019, Justin Clark, one of Trump’s 2020 election advisors, had this to say in leaked audio captured by a liberal advocacy group:
Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. …
Let’s start protecting our voters (regarding Election Day monitoring of polling places). We know where they are … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.
Clark claims this was taken out of context and that he was talking about historic, false allegations that the Republican Party suppresses votes — although the line, “let’s start playing offense” belies this argument — but when you actually do look at the historical record of how the conservative party in America actually is incontrovertibly guilty of widespread corruption at the ballot box, it becomes difficult to believe the president or anyone else in the Republican Party that their intentions are benevolent and on the up and up.
Slow Progress
Before the 15th Amendment became law, of course, the right to vote was more or less limited to white people who owned a certain amount of property. In the early 19th century, this began to change as restrictions were loosened in certain states. The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, only allowed black men to vote. Black folks almost exclusively voted for the Republican Party, which was, crucially, the more liberal party in American politics at the time, while the conservatives mainly inhabited the Democratic Party. These dynamics didn’t begin to shift until around the year 1900 when “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryant, a Democrat, began to champion increased economic equality and railed against the robber baron class. Although he would later take an anti-Darwin, anti-intellectual stance and is known to many atheists and secular humanists mainly as a fundamentalist Christian, he set in motion the populist left movement en route to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” platform, which was a kind precursor to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.
But back in the 1870s with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the issue of voting rights for black people was far from settled. Politicians and former slaveholders in the South, who were reeling economically from the devastating effects of war and attempting to set up a form of slavery by a different name, Reconstruction began to take shape. Some black folks did get to vote, and some members of the black community even got elected to state and federal offices, but in many cases in the South, literacy tests and poll taxes were introduced as an attempt to control the numbers of African Americans who could vote. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed to assert white influence in the nation and intimidate blacks and their supporters from participation in democracy and public life. [efn_note]”The Volume Library,” Volume II, Page 2239.[/efn_note]
Interestingly, three prominent Southern statesmen, Lucius Lamar in Mississippi, Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, said in a public statement that denying black people the right to vote was “not only impossible but undesired,” according to “Origins of the New South” by C. Vann Woodward. Whether it is actually true or not, Hampton claimed to be the “first man at (sic) the South” to support enfranchisement for black folks, and went so far as to say that the black man, “naturally allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.” Lamar defended black voting rights and supported a plan to provide federal dollars to local schools “emphasizing the benefits for former slaves,” according to The Mississippi Encyclopedia. [efn_note]”Origins of the New South,” C. Vann Woodward, 1951, Page 321.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”The Mississippi Encyclopedia,” 2017, Page 704.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Dubois, 1935, Page 443.[/efn_note]
But as Woodward notes, “The century had scarcely ended, however, before the prophecies of these statesmen were overturned throughout the South” as state after state rolled out disenfranchisement provisions through poll taxes and “other devices.”
That would largely remain the situation on voting rights until passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution when women got the vote.
Full Access?
Probably seeing the writing on the wall and how the arc of history was progressing up to that point, and that they were, in fact, losing, white leaders in the South became even more committed to restricting access to the voting booth for black people, and thus, we have the marches, sit-ins and the battle for rights that ensued in towns like Selma, Miss., where civil rights supporters were hosed and beaten with clubs for daring to challenge the status quo. The crucial moment, 100 years after ratification of the 15th amendment, came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, presumably giving black folks full access to the ballot box in practice, not just in theory. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the bill was important to prevent some of the more egregious voter suppression offenses.
(The act) included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote.
In the ensuing years, young people were able to vote and new protections were put into place for foreign-language speakers and disabled people.
Undermining Democracy
Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have used the tool of redistricting to their political advantage at various times, it has consistently been the conservatives who have sought to strike a blow for voting rights and make it restrictive for more people to make their voices heard.
The blow came with blunt force in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision and with a conservative majority, removed the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act, to which liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg remarked, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The Atlantic said this decision “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.”
The Voting Rights Act was only a starting point that was, itself, shamefully, more than 100 years in the making. As Trump is currently predicted to lose the popular vote once again, according to NBC News, we should probably expect more crowing from Trump and Co. about election fraud and additional methods, subtle as they may be, to try to prevent access to the ballot box.
The president may be called a “populist,” but little about the conservative platform or policies suggest that the party cares one whit about the will or interests of the people. They care about obtaining and retaining power. They can more effectively do that by undermining enfranchisement, which in turn, undermines democracy.
[Artwork credit: “State of Distress” by DeviantArt user cskelm.]