Republicans' new culture war push: Banning noncitizens from voting (P.S. They already can't)

For decades, Republicans have kept the same election playbook. Declare that America can no longer afford nice things, things such as decent social services, retirement, or any government project not directly related to bombing someone. Declare that taxes are oppression, and that taxes on the wealthy are outright communism, thus necessitating even more cuts than that.

But since all of that tends to be wildly unpopular once the public gets wind of how each cut affects them personally, the most important play of all is to invent some new, fictional cultural crisis that is threatening our nation's very existence. Flag-burning, for example. Or Christian "oppression" at the hands of The Gays. Or, and this is always popular, absolutely any attack that can be mounted on minorities or immigrants, for any reason, from the English-only freak-outs of heartland racists to Trump's 2016 declaration that America was under siege because Mexico was sending us their most hardened criminals. It is all premised on the Republican base being a forever-quivering mass of conspiracy-minded fears and resentments—on voters being stupid, in other words.

So here we are again. This year's manufactured Republican panic, brought to us by literally we do not know, thanks to shredded campaign finance laws, will be Immigrants Are Secretly Voting In Our Elections! And the party's pointless culture-war-premised horseshit, crafted to drive panicking racists to the voting booths, will be, in Florida and apparently in as many other states as funding allows, new, absolutely pointless ballot measures to change state constitutions to make it super- , extra-clear that NoEs FoR ReAL tHOsE IMMyGRaNts CaNt voTE!.

The Washington Post's report on the Florida ballot measure, which has already collected more signatures than "any other ballot initiative in Florida state history," according to its organizers, notes several interesting coincidences about the would-be measure.

• It's being promoted by a wealthy Mar-a-Lago couple who are close to Trump, but being organized by an Arizona-based Republican consultant and financed to the tune of $4.7 million by mysterious, anonymous donors. The consultant, who has a long history of similar archconservative get-out-the-vote culture-war electioneering, aims to turn it into a nationwide drive as well.

• Absolutely everyone involved is clamming up about where the money comes from. They ain't saying. The secrecy suggests that either the money is coming from someplace particularly bad or, just as likely, even the funders know they need to avoid being associated with such a blatantly race-baiting effort.

• The ballot measure is, literally, pointless. The Florida state Constitution already specifies who may vote: citizens at least 18 years of age. The measure wants to add an "only" to ostensibly make it super-double-extra-clear that noncitizens are not allowed to vote. (Federal law already bars noncitizen voting in federal elections, trumping the state constitution for those elections regardless of the text.)

Organizers point to a dozen or so towns nationwide where immigrants are specifically allowed to vote on low-level, local ballots for things such as school boards; none are in Florida or in other conservative states, obviously. This is the kernel from which the nationwide seething racist panic is to sprout, if the culture warriors can manage it. As in the cases of “creeping Sharia,” or the idiot Tennessee lawmakers who mistook a janitor’s sink for a special Muslim bathing station, the premise is that this sliver of local-minded liberality will be inching into THE FLORIDA STATE HOUSE ITSELF if somebody doesn’t stop it first.

Translation: It's a well-funded exercise in tail-chasing being pushed by Donald Trump's personal allies for purely symbolic, cultural reasons, and paid for by you're-not-allowed-to-know. That indeed sounds like the modern Republican Party.

Trump, remember, has long pushed a conspiracy notion that "millions" of noncitizens must have voted in places such as California, driving the vote totals up, because otherwise, he insists, he surely would have won the popular vote rather than just squeaking out a tight Electoral College win. Whether he got the idea from his Mar-a-Lago allies or they from him is unclear, however; all we really know is that the place continues to be a cesspool of cynical con-artistry aimed at fleecing the America that exists outside its gates.

It was evident that Trump was going to insist on racist anti-immigrant conspiracies as his central campaign strategy. Now we have a glimpse of how Republican strategists and allies intend to lay the groundwork for that push.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2ZaYUVv