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1/? Despite knowing it was a gotcha question, despite knowing exactly what headlines would be spun out of it, Bernie defended his proposal to let prisoners vote in last night's #CNNTownHall. No "let's have a conversation about it" (Kamala), no rejecting it out of hand (Buttigieg)
2/? This required both moral and political courage, and is why Bernie has been able to shift the bar on issue after issue. America stuffs its poor and minority population into for-profit prisons under drug laws that have deliberately targeted and criminalized them.
3/? Former Nixon advisor John Erlichman laid it out very clearly: drug policy was a way to attack the president's enemies. "Disrupting their communities," of course, was a euphemistic way of saying "ruining their lives." Full article: harpers.org/archive/2016/0… 
4/? Once in prison, this population could be politically neutered, to the point of having their voting rights stripped from them-often, for the rest of their lives. And that was the point: the drug war was the use of draconian law to suppress inconvenient political participation.
5/? As the documentary "Thirteenth" shows, the loophole in the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was that it provided for such as punishment for a crime - hence, the subsequent need to criminalize whole classes of the population.
6/? African-Americans ("monsters", "beasts"), political radicals ("traitors") and so on. So of course, why should such traitorous deviants be able to wield something as "sacred" as the vote? Bernie's courageous proposal is a first step in remedying this historical travesty.
7/? The next steps are to abolish for-profit prisons, end the war on drugs and legalize them, and close down the general state of incarceration and militarization which are two side of the same coin - domestic and international. And in the process, rediscover our humanity.
