What else is the Grand Old Party for? States’ rights to reject federal efforts to standardize federal election rules and ensure ease of casting ballots for all Americans. Why should there be national rules for national elections? Totally unfair if you control a state government!

These “conservatives” want to make sure their partisan advantage is preserved wherever they currently have it, and are proposing hundreds of creepy new laws in as many states as possible to guarantee partisan advantage. Georgia’s was one of the splashiest, and while litigation continues, it stays in full force and effect for upcoming elections, absent a filibuster-blocked federal law to the contrary.

The Federalist Society 6-3 Supreme Court majority announced, in the recent 6-3 Brnovich v. DNC decision, that, in principle, partisanship is a perfectly fine motive in making laws. There is nothing the Court, or the Constitution, can do about “political questions” like partisan gerrymandering or seemingly restrictive partisan voting laws (mandating masks or vaccines is not considered “political” and can be quickly struck down).

Partisan voting laws that may also disproportionately disadvantage ethnic minorities, under Brnovich, can only be set aside if they are provably virtually 100% racist in expressed intent. Partisan voting laws are perfectly cool with the partisan six, emanators of the stench. Elena Kagan’s dissent had the better of the argument:

“This Court has no right to remake Section 2 [of the VRA]. Maybe some think that vote suppression is a relic of history—and so the need for a potent Section 2 has come and gone. … But Congress gets to make that call.”^[25] Kagan further wrote “What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses. What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.'”^[29]

source

Although, one could argue that in 2013 John Roberts and four other corporatist justices set the precedent that the Court has the right to void the virtually unanimous bipartisan will of both Houses of Congress and the President, when their then 5-4 majority overruled a 400-20 House majority, a 98-0 Senate vote and the public approval of the sitting Republican president to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, which the five eviscerated without anesthesia or so much as the figleaf of a coherent legal argument. John Roberts based his ruling on a shrewd mix of misconception and lies, dispensed cooly and couched in the most reasonable nd judicious language.

For purposes of the sacred Electoral College, Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes, getting all of their electors. Trump was enraged and did everything he could think of after the election to get Georgia officiald to find 11,780 votes for him. He had Lindsey Graham call Raffensberger, who he correctly felt was ducking his calls.

Republicans in Georgia followed the law, and Trump’s loss stood, so Trump demanded the law be changed, post haste, in every state he lost. The GOP quickly fell into line behind Trump’s baseless, racist rants about supposedly massive, though unprovable, Black Voter Fraud (it’s always Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta… where the imagined fraud all took place, coincidentally all areas with large Black and Brown populations vote, (that’s how you blow a foghorn dog whistle, you angry, paranoid, irrational, superior, urban sodomites).

Here is a piece about how well Georgia’s new voter integrity/voter suppression law has been working so far (pardon the format, fucking YouTube wouldn’t let me copy or share it any other way…)

Make no mistake, these American States’ Rights (except for “anarchist jurisdictions”) authoritarians mean business. Business, literally, the unforgiving, freedom loving religion of the American ruling class. They never lost the goddamned Civil War and they don’t plan to lose this war neither.