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Everyone loves a good Slobs vs. Snobs movie. From \u201cMeatballs\u201d to \u201cAnimal House,\u201d it\u2019s a winning genre: Some screwups come together and try every crazy stunt to save the place and the things they love. And, by gum, the sundowning president, the gimp Congress, some crooked governors and psychotic legislatures, the chief justice and his platoon \u2014 the Horndog, the Flag Dweeb, the Drunk, the Rich Kid Who Does Peyote and The Girl \u2014 are all going to pitch in and save the Klavern from closing down.<\/p>
If the GOP<\/a> is radiating one signal like a throbbing air-defense siren, it\u2019s that it\u2019s time to win it all, or lose everything trying. Come November, villainous elite voters and engaged citizens will prevail \u2014 unless they pull out all the stops.<\/p> In the wake of two recent Supreme Court decisions granting something like free-for-all status for conservatives to select the right kinds of voters, it feels as if all stories now converge on the ballot. The repetition of \u201cthis is the most important election of your lifetime\u201d has diminished its effect, so if nothing else it\u2019s refreshing that this one could be credibly billed as the last, for both parties. The Supreme Court has said as much.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p> So much of the conservative movement, from the womb up, abhors a choice, however, and after years of eliminationist rhetoric and cries of theft at every loss, they\u2019re doing everything they can to finally get rid of the electoral one. It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s not a fair fight; white supremacy just has to win one, and then it never has to hold any after. And even if much of the media and Democratic Party<\/a> haven\u2019t really heard the court, Republican officials in Texas, Ohio, Utah, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Missouri and Alabama have, moving heaven, earth and whatever voting districts they can to immunize the Republican Party to democracy.<\/p> It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s not a fair fight; white supremacy just has to win one.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure> About that last state, the Roberts Court stepped in this Monday to make sure nobody in Alabama got the wrong idea about restraint. The court had already effectively killed off the Voting Rights Act in\u00a0Louisiana v. Callais, freeing up Dixie legislators to do whatever they want, so long as they don\u2019t launch into Bond villain monologues confessing\u00a0their explicit racist intent<\/a>. But with Alabama\u2019s redistricting, it used the shadow docket<\/a> to pour on the gas, reversing its own 2023 decision that prevented a racial gerrymander in the Cotton State. \u00a0<\/p> Usually when somebody \u201csays the quiet part out loud,\u201d everyone else has permission to acknowledge and repeat the statement. But despite the court\u2019s screaming volume on the purpose of its election-year rulings<\/a>, many precincts of the media are only starting to break from institutional deference and a reluctance to challenge John Roberts on balls and strikes. In the institutionalist\u2019s defense, that slow acceptance owes something to the facile cynicism of the court\u2019s behavior: procedural mummery, historical dives shallower than punching out after one paragraph of Wikipedia, contempt for evidence and pretexts so thin that it all feels like an insult just to detail it to another person. A reasonable mind rebels at the simplicity of such bullshit, but it\u2019s just co-conspiratorial Calvinball again<\/a>, this time with maps and calendars. Anything that electorally benefits Democrats is, ipso facto,\u00a0too close to the election and unfair to voters. But if it helps Republicans \u2026 then, buddy,\u00a0we heard you like elections so we let you have an election in your election<\/a>. (To be fair, the court did not tell Louisiana to conduct a do-over in the middle of an election, but we all can\u2019t wait to find out how extremely legal it was.)\u00a0<\/p> Whether the GOP base considers the ballot box the first or last stop on the battlefield, the more effective subaltern goons in the Trump<\/a> administration have been hollowing out the last of the Church Committee reforms with the same mechanism conservatives brought to the Voting Rights Act \u2014 stripped of all power except existing on the books. Trump<\/a>\u2019s security state has enormous latitude to label its opposition as terrorism-related, to investigate it without factual pretext and to surveil and intervene to prevent acts of terror \u2014 evidence pending, assuming even seeing it wouldn\u2019t somehow put us in even more<\/em> national security jeopardy. Which is to say,\u00a0per Spencer Ackerman at Zeteo<\/a>, COINTELPRO is back, baby.<\/p> Trump\u2019s big strategy for problems has always been \u201cmake it go away.\u201d A childish fatuity in most cases, it is remarkably effective with a national security state that already likes black-bagging its problems and a conservative Supreme Court that likes helping them. Trump\u2019s instinctive affinity for \u201cremoving\u201d people from the country finally has a national security strategy that points the imperial spear inward at the enemy homeland. When we form our big, beautiful Joint Terrorism Task Forces, we must direct them at groups that may one day \u2014 if they meet the right FBI catfish \u2014 be goaded into political violence but that currently pose ideological threats, the deadliest of all. These include views critical of American, capitalist or Christian \u201cvalues,\u201d or practicing immigration or gender extremism, which at this point amounts to functioning while brown or queer, or simply disagreeing with the Republican Party.\u00a0<\/p> Criteria that vague with a party this lawless means they apply to anybody you can squint at twice. If Trump ended his last term having people kidnapped, it\u2019s hardly a stretch to envision him disappearing members of key constituencies a few weeks before Election Day and shipping them off to a human rights black hole like Camp Sal\u00f2, staffed exclusively by Immigration and Customs Enforcement<\/a> officers who failed a “Draw a Duck” psych exam.\u00a0<\/p> They are sprinting to dismantle democracy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure> Perhaps that seems farfetched, and the mind retreats to the relative comfort of imagining neighborhoods in key districts ringed with Department of Homeland Security checkpoints on Election Day, in the name of national security. But while anyone complicit in such a scheme should already<\/em> be stripped of power and imprisoned, such measures don\u2019t match the right\u2019s urgency to enshrine one-party rule and avoid becoming just another demographic. They didn\u2019t come this far to not fire every round. Bret Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett didn\u2019t help steal the 2000 election to have to legalize yesterday\u2019s vote-suppression today. Besides, that dork Ron DeSantis and the charmless mutants of the Florida Legislature managed to pass a poll tax and follow it up by deploying a voter-intimidation flying squad without paying a price, so why should Trump settle for any less?\u00a0<\/p> The courts certainly give him no reason to pause on this account, even before accounting for rulings that effectively make Trump immune to all law. Politico reported this week<\/a> that the Trump administration has lost in court over its immigration detentions roughly 9,000 out of 10,000 times. Even if Roberts were to reach into the magical shadow docket, pick a migrant case at random and yell, \u201cKnock it off,\u201d the wider regime of kidnapping and trafficking would continue undeterred, as the president assigned JTTFs to determine who had been \u201cvery, very unfair to Mr. Trump.\u201d<\/p> The fact that it took all of two weeks for the Southern GOP to try to restore Jim Crow is breathtaking. The fact that the Supreme Court hopped back in halfway through to tell them to go faster is one of the most disgusting legal actions of anyone\u2019s lifetime. If there is anything hopeful amid all this atrocity, it is that Republicans know this is their last shot. It\u2019s full white supremacy again, or a long night of demographic minority. They are sprinting to dismantle democracy and at the same time they are finally running for their lives.<\/p>\n The post The Ballot and the Bullet<\/a> appeared first on Truthdig<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\n
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jim crow,john roberts,Louisiana v. Callais,supreme court,voting rights act\r\n
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