A Note On Today’s SCOTUS Voting Rights Ruling
A Note On Today’s SCOTUS Voting Rights Ruling
An addendum to yesterday’s essay, “Conservative Trigger Warning: American History.”
The United States Supreme Court, photo by Jesse Collins on Unsplash.
This is an addendum to yesterday’s essay.
Today’s US Supreme Court ruling on Arizona’s racially restrictive voting rules is the latest example of how the GOP and conservative thinking are poised to take this country back to its racist, bigoted, and discriminatory founding.
Yesterday, I wrote that conservative backlash against Critical Race Theory was the latest in a long line of culture-war fights fueled by right-wing propaganda designed to stop the US from fulfilling the Founder’s ideal of achieving a free and democratic society for all. In a 6-3 split favoring the un-democratically appointed conservatives, today's US Supreme Court ruling upholds Arizona’s racially discriminatory voting restrictions and further enshrines our country’s gravest moral failings further into the fabric of America law.
This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been following conservative ideology for the last 70 years. Time and time again, the Republican Party and its members have argued against increased voting participation because the party would need to do real work to get votes while valorizing the Founding Fathers and our country’s founding myth.
On the one hand, conservatives often argue that our country and our laws aren’t racist in any way, shape, or form. However, in today’s SCOTUS ruling, the conservative justices admitted that some racism embedded in the voting process that denies Americans their right to vote is a wonderful and wholly patriotic outcome of American Democracy. The thinking pushes a narrative its members are actively and openly fighting against.
It’s incongruent but on-brand.
Here’s The Tip Jar!
The level of liberty achieved today wasn’t available to Americans in the original US Constitution. It required the Bill of Rights, Amendments, and legislation to obtain, and, as the conservative court has shown, each can be toppled by a minority with perverse interpretations of American mythology.
Connecting today’s developments with the return of Jim Crow, Segregation, and Reconstruction isn’t fantasy but a real possibility. You have justices who believe the Constitution was a perfect document at its inception, which should frighten everyone, and over the last 10 years they’ve diligently worked to peel back centuries of progress for an ideal the Founders would have flatly rejected as fascism disguised as patriotism.
Once you understand that this is the outcome conservatives are actively working toward, their actions make a lot more sense. You can also see how democracy sits on a dangerous precipice, ready to be pushed over the edge by a rabid minority of anti-American racists. The country will not become a more perfect union if those minorities in power continue to wield outsized amounts of influence to deny the people’s will.
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