Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a campaign event in Oviedo, Florida, on November 5, 2022.
Come now the election monitors—some to ensure Americans get to vote, others to make damn sure that those who look like they may vote for Democrats can’t.
In Florida today, the DeSantis regime has said that a new Florida law prohibits federal Justice Department monitors from going to polling places to ensure that voters can vote. This has been a project of the Justice Department since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 charged the department with that duty, and it’s something that it has done thousands of times in thousands of counties since then, including in 64 counties across the nation today. This is the first time, however, that a state government has refused them entry. DeSantis claims that state law supersedes federal law, much in the spirit of John C. Calhoun’s doctrine of nullification, under which states can overrule those federal laws (initially, pertaining to slavery) that their governors don’t like.
The reason the feds have deployed to three Florida counties is doubtless that DeSantis has created his own election police, empowered to stop suspicious-looking (i.e., Black) voters from voting. This current bout of racially determined denials of voting rights began when 60 percent of Florida voters approved a ballot measure giving former felons who’d served their time the right to vote again. The Republican legislature responded by requiring those former felons to pay off whatever fines they still owed, and declined to require the government to contact those former felons with such useful information as whether they actually still owed fines and if so, in what amounts. DeSantis then made clear that voting if a fine was still owed was a criminal offense punishable by jail time, which, disinterested observers must admit, was a highly successful way of discouraging voting by Floridians who didn’t know whether they still had outstanding payments due.
Just in case that anxiety wasn’t enough to suppress votes, DeSantis established his very own police force to patrol the polls—where, of course, they’d have no way of knowing who was paid up and who wasn’t, but where they could certainly challenge anyone they deemed suspicious (key index: skin color), thereby both intimidating voters and slowing down the lines so that some prospective voters on unforgiving schedules would leave. That, in turn, required DeSantis to determine which lines he wanted to slow down, so the locations where his cops are deployed would perforce be heavily Democratic and Black.
Hence the presence of the feds in the state’s three most heavily Democratic counties (Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach), where DeSantis’s goons would tend to congregate.
How much of an outlier is DeSantis in the onetime party of Lincoln? Not much, it turns out. It was Chief Justice John Roberts, after all, who in his majority opinion in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder struck down much of the Voting Rights Act on the grounds that the racist practices of yore were long gone. (Apparently, if the racist vote suppressors didn’t wear white sheets and pointy hoods, that couldn’t constitute suppression.)
And Roberts wasn’t much of an outlier, either.
In 1986, while working in my final gig as a campaign consultant, I was managing a retention campaign for three California Supreme Court justices. In the course of the campaign, I met Jim Brosnahan, an attorney who was a leading member of the Bay Area legal community and a major supporter of the three justices. That summer, though, he made a quick trip to Washington to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings for one of President Reagan’s judicial nominees.
In 1962, as assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix, Brosnahan had been called to one Election Day polling place where a young Republican poll watcher was challenging so many Hispanics lined up to vote that the line had ground to a halt. In his testimony, Brosnahan said that the lawyer who had been doing that challenging was, in fact, the very person whose nomination was before the committee.
That person was William Rehnquist, whom the Republican majority on the committee and then the Republican majority in the Senate proceeded to confirm as chief justice of the United States. Perhaps due to Brosnahan’s testimony, Rehnquist made no frontal assaults on the Voting Rights Act while chief justice, but Roberts, his successor, suffered under no such constraints.
So voter suppressors can wear all kinds of robes—white with pointy hats or black while on the bench. And today, the raiment of DeSantis’s thugs adds new designs to the suppressors’ wardrobe options.
