THIS IS HOW DEMOCRACY IS LOST.

     There is an economics principle called Gresham's Law: bad money, whether coins of baser metals or, presumably bitcoin, drives out the good. It applies equally to democracy, though as the monetary value increases, the quality of democracy diminishes. Too much money cheapens democracy by allowing plutocrats and oligarchs to steal government from the consent of the governed. The Supreme Court has been on that path since they ruled that money is free speech. The final coda was put in place on Friday, at the end of the 2021 session, when their ruling knocked the legs out of article 2 of the Voting Rights Act. 

     It has been a long torturous process, accomplished one small step at a time. We have a tiny few very wealthy donors to thank for it, chief among them Charles Koch and his now dead brother, David. By contrast, the perennial boogeyman claimed by the right, George Soros, uses his wealth to promote an open society and progressive policies. How did this happen?

     The simple answer is that Republicans did it and Democrats let it happen. There has been an organized effort for some 50 years to convince the electorate that government can't help us; that only unregulated businesses are our friends. This was not sufficient to move a majority of voters without the help of voter suppression tactics. Paul Wyrich, a Reagan adviser and co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, explicitly told attendees of a conservative political caucus that very thing: "...I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now." Later he said, " our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Over the last 50 years those tactics have evolved. No more the Jim Crow era laws. No requiring a voter to guess accurately the number of beans in a jar. No white-robed Klansmen milling around the voting stations (though there is an emerging movement in Texas and Georgia laws allowing just that. Without the white robes.) They started by inviting Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to cross over to the Republican party. For a generation they were allowed to use the occasional dog-whistle to the white voters who were allowed to be more subtle in their racism. Later it was the so-called Moral Majority who proclaimed that Jimmy Carter was insufficiently Christian. Both of those groups were highly active and mobilized to vote party-line. Tough on crime, law-and-order, abortion, and anti-drug policies created the soft place for those people to nest within the party. Later it was lying about a sexual act committed by President Clinton which was their pretext for impeachment, and the opportunity to weaken the Democratic hold on those voters who publicly disapproved of marital infidelity. Ironicaly, quite a few Republicans, including House Speaker Newt Gingerich, were concealing their own sexual liaisons, and Ken Starr, who led the legal investigation has his own skeletons in the metaphorical clost. This was not good enough for Republicans to win the Presidency after Clintons first term, or keep the majority in the House. Newt Gingerich remade himself as a historian and a talk-show guest on the recently created, Foxnews. Four years later, Republicans regained the majority in the House. They also gained the Presidency by losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College which, unnoticed by us, was being created to favor Republicans. And this was the more subtle tactic for voter suppression: precincts in wealthy areas had enough voting machines to keep the lines short. They also had the mobility to travel to the voting location without difficulty. Not so those whose zip codes which were in areas with concentrations of black, poor, and marginalized citizens. In many states, those unfortunate who became felons due to drug use or other crimes, were unable to legally vote. Florida was one of those states. The voters approved a ballot measure to return that franchise to former inmates. The Republican governor who signed this bill into law, and worked diligently to promote it, Charlie Crist, was proclaimed by the money people, a RINO, and summarily voted out of office to be followed by Rick Scott, a healthcare billionaire who was penalized $50 million for Medicare fraud but still found to be more pure than Gov. Crist. When Scott saw an opportunity to run for the Senate, Ron DeSantis was elected and once more, former felons lost their voting privileges. Many of us remember bitterly when hanging Chad's, in the Florida ballots, gave George W Bush a 5000 vote win in a state where his brother was then Governor, and thus the Electoral College votes to win the presidency. We were told by rightwing radio, "It's over, get over it!". We never have.

     Republicans are finding it harder to win the presidency. Twice in a generation, 2000 and 2016, the Electoral College saved their bacon. In addition, those states actively practicing Weyrich's dictum about creating ways for preserving the voting privilege of the meritocracy, while convincing the underserved to maybe stay home, they were able to gerrymander precincts where white people were able to capture more legislative offices, both locally and nationally. This was accomplished by such "think-tanks" as the Heritage Foundation, ALEC (a Koch group) and the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society, ironically, is the States-Rights group of our historical past: they are anti-federalist. Republican presidents, with the aid of newly-strengthened Senate majorities, were able to change the make-up of the Supreme Court in relatively short order, over some two decades. Our one small victory was in the mid-80s when we were able to stop Robert Bork from becoming a justice. We were blessed with a so-called moderate, Anthony Kennedy, who sometimes behaved as one. Then, as now, abortion was always the spoken reason, while race remained hidden in the background, with the occasional dog-whistle remaining to stir the racist soul. We do not need to review recent Supreme Court history, suffice it to say, the Civil Rights Act of 1965 has been attacked so successfully that they have nearly eliminated its protections. 

     Sometime around 2008, as Barack Obama sought the presidency, a new rightwing pressure group emerged, the Tea Party. Its purpose was ostensibly to lower taxes, but always lurking in the background were those whites concerned by impending population dynamics. And that has lead us to Donald Trump and red-state governors and legislators concerned about voter fraud while practicing voting suppression openly. Occasionally, more often than any fears of voter fraud from lefties, Republicans could be found doing the actual voter fraud. The penalty is a slap on the wrist. Those Democrats found to be voting while still on parole (and, while being black) can look forward to long prison terms. 

     To date Republicans have been all too successful in their quest. The only possibility for national voting rights protections is held hostage by the Senate filibuster. It is unlikely that the two Democratic Senators (Manshun and Sinema) upholding bi-partisanship with a party that feels that  "bi-partisanship is the moral equivolent of date rape", will find it in their hearts to protect the rights of people not white and from wealthy enclaves. We may have to convince ourselves that winning those rights back will take much longer than it took to end them. It is always this way. So whaddaya gonna do, give up? Or are you going to redouble your energies and take back those rights one legislative bill after another? Are you going to take legislative action against the party that created this situation? Or are we going to allow democracy to remain in the hands of the highest bidder?