This is a VERY good analysis of why the Georgia vote suppression law is, in fact, very bad nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/…
The bill cuts the time frame for requesting absentee ballots in half. (Note -- and this will be a theme -- this is just pure vote suppression, with no even remotely colorable connection to fraud)
Compare how vote suppression apologist Rich Lowry poo-poos the dramatic cutback in ballot drop boxes with what the statute actually does. (Again, pure vote suppression -- there is zero evidence of fraud at drop boxes.)
The state made it illegal for local government to mail absentee ballot applications. Again, pure vote suppression, with no connection to claims of fraud whatsoever:
The law gratuitously bans the mobile voting centers used by Fulton County, not because of any evidence of fraud but because Georgia Republicans think Black people voting is bad in principle
The statute also makes it harder for people with 9-to-5 jobs to vote early
The purely cruel and gratuitous ban on bringing water to people waiting in deliberately long lines has already been widely noted. (And contrary to that the National Review will tell you, electioneering was already illegal.)
The law deliberately makes ballot counting slower, to allow for the cultivation of Trump-like conspiracy theories
And, critically, Georgia's undemocratic, gerrymandered Republican legislature has taken over election machinery and punished the officials who refused to go along with Trump's lies, making a stolen election more likely in the future
In short, this is an appalling statute, the comparisons with Jim Crow are perfectly appropriate, and Savvy takes that it's not that bad should go away now
Good on Major League Baseball. Vote suppression should entail costs:
Can we please cut this shit out. "I also don't like certain things about how the DHS operates, so when RFK SHAKES THINGS UP maybe he will do it in a sensible manner I approve of" is the kind of delusional thinking that leads you to President Donald J. Trump in the first place
"When Biden said he would end the war in Afghanistan, he actually meant that he would end all military conflict in the world forever" isn't even goalpost moving, it's like saying the Florida Panthers promised to win the Stanley Cup but are losers because the Marlins are 43-73
Sorry, the scale of drone warfare -- by far the most important metric in determining the hawkishness of a president 10 years ago -- by random coincidence permanently ceased to be a meaningful variable on January 21, 2017. I don't make the rules
"James Comey was in the tank for Hillary Clinton" ROFL. Glenn really should reconsider the "tweeting about dogs in Portuguese" approach to days when something bad happens for his political side
One point to add is that it was incredibly stupid of Comey to think his statement would help clarify why Clinton wasn't indicted (i.e. because nobody ever has been for comparable conduct.) Inevitably, the only message people got was "extremely careless" lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/how-ar…
As Patrick Deneen is making the rounds with a new book generating credulous coverage for claims that "post-liberal" reactionaries are actually more egalitarian than liberals, keep this in mind:
The Biden administration is enacting exactly the kind of pro-labor, pro-domestic manufacturing, pro-environmental industrial policy Deneen and his allies claim to want, and they don't care at all: lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/the-re…
Instead, Deneen's actual friends and allies are all politicians who supported Trump's upper-class tax cuts and Trump's efforts to take healthcare away from tens of millions of people to pay for even more upper-class tax cuts: politico.com/news/magazine/…
It’s worth noting that the only reason Trump is the first former president to be indicted is that Gerald Ford unwisely preempted them lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/its-th…
Ford's pardon was very unpopular -- indeed, it probably cost him re-election -- and should not be seen as establishing some kind of American constitutional tradition that former presidents should be above the law.
Plainly, Alabama should never have panicked and brought in Vladimir Myshkin to start the second period
Meanwhile, in dissent Alito offers the “Martin Luther King’s entire career consisted of one speech which consisted of one sentence” school of statutory interpretation