I have a post up at Greg's on the recent kerfluffle over DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz comparing GOP proposals that would make voting more difficult to Jim Crow:
But while the analogy was inappropriate, Wasserman-Schultz was absolutely right that Republicans have used their new majorities in statehouses to erect institutional barriers to voting that are more likely to disadvantage Democratic-leaning constituencies, minorities in particular. Recent Republican proposals have or would put in place onerous voter ID requirements, curtail early voting, and prevent students from casting ballots where they go to school. These proposals are costly and could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands if not millions of voters, but most of those affected are more likely to vote for Democrats. Republicans have invoked the specter of voter fraud to justify the restrictions, but the type of voter fraud these laws are designed to address are extremely rare — the Bush administration, despite pursuing the issue vigorously, never produced more than a handful of voter fraud prosecutions.
There's also something rich about Republicans lecturing Wasserman-Shultz on historical perspective. After all, they've spent the last several years building an absurd narrative of white racial grievance, sometimes drawing explicit comparisons between America under Obama and Jim Crow. Nowhere has this manifested more absurdly than in association with the New Black Panther Voter intimidation case, which conservatives used to allege a conspiracy between the White House and a black separatist group. Jennifer Rubin, who was at the forefront of publishing such innuendo and has spent the last two years tossing outrageous accusations of racism at the Obama administration, now insists that Wasserman-Schultz didn’t go far enough in retracting her analogy, writing that restating the “Republicans are racists” line in less flashy terms “is still a slur.” This is coming from the same person who suggested Attorney General Eric Holder was guilty of racism when he pointed out, accurately, that the New Black Panther case was not at all comparable to what black people faced in the South prior to the 1960s. Rubin really doesn’t have much room to lecture Wasserman-Schultz on historical perspective — or even on tossing around frivolous accusations of racism.
It's important to remember that Jim Crow wasn't about having to fill out an extra form to cast a ballot, the entire system was underpinned by violence, real and threatened. Wasserman-Schultz's analogy was inaccurate, but at least she was describing an actual systemic problem. The voting restrictions supported by the GOP will affect millions of people; Republicans couldn't find a single voter intimidated by the NBPP in Philadelphia in 2008. Nevertheless, they attacked Attorney General Eric Holder for pointing out that comparing the NBPP incident to the Jim Crow South was offensive.
Anyway, it's to Republicans' advantage to shift the conversation to who is accusing whom of racism rather than the actual impact of their proposed voting restrictions, which by hampering access to the ballot box do far more damage to the integrity of the voting process than the phantom problem they're supposed to solve.
