by Noah
If you're a Republican, "one person one vote" depends on who you define as a person. No wonder so many Republicans want to interpret the Constitution literally, as it was originally written in the late 18th century, when it counted black people as only 3/5 human.
Meet Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, the Confederacy's new George Wallace. As Georgia Secretary of State, he oversaw his own "election" like they do in any banana republic. That's how Kemp got to where he is. He "outcounted" Stacy Abrams and cheated the system, the election system that he claimed was smooth running and flawless as long as it elected racist Jim Crow white supremacists like himself. When it didn't back in November and January, he and his fellow white supremacists in his all but hand-picked state legislature decided to take cheating and Jim Crow strategizing to an exponentially more racist level. To top it off, he pointedly signed his new, improved, now with more racism Jim Crow voting legislation into law while posing with a group of fellow virulent white supremacists in front of a large painting of a notorious slave-owning plantation. If that isn't the happy dream of any republican you've ever met, what is?
George Wallace was an old southern dixiecrat from neighboring Alabama. In the 1960s, he was the leading political opponent of the civil rights movement, a title Kemp is now trying to claim for himself. Wallace was perhaps most infamous for standing in a doorway at a state university to block integration and screaming "Segregation today. Segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his inauguration speech. That was 60 years ago and it could have been 160 years ago. People like Brian Kemp and his repug legislative toadies still take inspiration from Wallace's actions and words. When it comes down to it, after all their obfuscation and denial, those words are their motto. Those words are engraved upon their low wattage racist brains and they always have been and always will be. There is no redemption possible for Georgia Republicans. In Kemp's new voting laws, Georgia republican voters got what they voted for and what they fully expected from Brian Kemp and the state legislators they all so eagerly voted for and asked to represent their sick desires and beliefs. To Georgia Republicans, their Brian Kemp isn't just their Governor, he is their Grand Wizard.
Ironically, while many African nations are moving towards democracy, Georgia and many other Republican-controlled states are deliberately moving in the opposite direction. While the media concentrates on lesser but still important problems in the new Georgia law such as making it illegal to give people waiting in line to vote for 6 hours so much as a bottle of water, the most important parts of the law are the ones that enable the Governor's state election board to override any local election board of the state if they don't like how the legitimate count of the turned out. In other words, under the new Georgia law, Governor Kemp could have overridden the 2020 election vote counts anywhere in the state and done exactly what Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to do. Kemp could have negated the election of President Joe Biden, Senator Raphael Warnock, Senator Jon Ossoff and countless others. Election officials (fixers) now even have the power of unlimited challenges to a person's voter registration. That's pure Jim Crow! In other words, If they look at you and guess how you might vote, they now have unlimited power to say "No vote for you." They might as well rename Atlanta Moscow. That's how countries with fake democracies end up with presidents getting 97% of the votes. This is a brazen war on even the concept of democracy itself. That is the goal of the new Georgia voting law. If this law had been in place just a few months ago, Kemp could have dictatorially thrown out the legal results that Georgia citizens voted for and declared his own chosen candidates the winners wherever he wanted. It's "we don't need your stinkin' votes." This is a republican wet dream come true. It pushes Georgia onto a downhill slide to North Korea or the Philippines. It is the Putinization of Georgia.
This is all the gift of the Supreme Court under racist Chief Justice John Roberts who slyly led the court in declaring, back in 2013, that the need for Voting rights laws no longer existed. He had campaigned against the 1965 Voting Rights Act for decades and when he got the chance, he acted. Brian Kemp and those of like mind are systematically filling the void left by the anti-democracy action of the Roberts Court.
Georgia is not the only state where this sort of thing is being attempted by Republican (Nazi) controlled legislatures. Arizona Republicans, Texas Republicans, and those in other states, south and north, are trying the same thing. In fact, white supremacists in the governments of 43 states are currently in the process of ramming over 250 pieces of racist voter suppression legislation into law. It's a mighty push against the inevitability of a near-future America where whites are the minority. That fills them with fear and bigotry. In the old Jim Crow times, the next step was public lynching of black people. This is where the followers of such politicians will go next. America has seen this tragic movie before. Ask yourself what Hitler would do. For Republicans, it's an advice question Republicans have been asking among themselves since Nixon unleashed his southern strategy and Reagan decided to go to Philadelphia, Mississippi to announce his campaign and send a message to fellow racists everywhere at the same time. Georgia's Brian Kemp is doing the same thing by signing his new law in front of the aforementioned painting of the notorious plantation. No one is daring to say it yet but it's obvious that Kemp plans to ride the racism of millions of un-American Americans to the top office in the land.
