You Have No Excuse for Not Voting. Not Anymore.

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

02 July 14

We get the government we deserve, and we are on track for one that is heedless of concern for women's health, and poised to eliminate unions.

ereabouts, we've long been amused by the deep thoughts of Utah's Senator Mike Lee, who is to the Constitution what Paul Ryan is to actual economics. Which is to say, he is recognized as a konztitooshinul skolar because he keeps telling people that he is — just as the Zombie Eyed Granny Starver has become known as a "budget wonk" because enough people have called him that — despite the fact that the full implications of the Ninth, 13th, 14th and 15th amendments seem to have eluded his notice. Anyway, Mike Lee put his very big brain to work yesterday regarding the Supreme Court's Humanae Vitae decision in favor of the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood folks. Mike Lee's very big brain labored very hard and came up with a constitutional basis for why women are basically sluts.

During an appearance on Sirius XM's The Wilkow Majority, host Andrew Wilkow argued that the real question in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., was about "whether or not a person who runs a business should be forced to provide something that is largely for recreational behavior, if it goes against their religious beliefs." Lee, responded by saying "Yea, that's right, that's right," before claiming that "this administration is using the often coercive power of the federal government to force people into their way of being and their way of existing, their way of believing and thinking and acting."

So there really isn't any excuse any more.

Over the weekend, I watched the PBS documentary on Freedom Summer, the effort 50 years ago to register African Americans to vote in the state of Mississippi, the effort that cost so many people so dearly, especially the families of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, who were beaten and shot to death, and buried in a dam, because the state of Mississippi had local police forces shot through with the Ku Klux Klan. Now, five decades later, with a Republican House far gone into nihilistic vandalism, and with the Senate hanging in the balance, and a Supreme Court one septuagenarian's heartbeat away from a return to the golden days of the last Gilded Age, and a Democratic president in the White House on whom those responsible for the previous three phenomena have painted a bullseye, we keep hearing about how hard it is going to be for the Democratic party to turn out its voters this fall to take advantage of the opportunities for which Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner gave their lives, and did so in my lifetime, not in a distant antebellum episode in some backwater.

So there really isn't any excuse any more.

Quite simply, if the Republican party gains control of the United States Senate, and if it maintains that majority in 2016, neither Barack Obama, nor Hillary Clinton, if she were to succeed him in office, will be allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice. It will not happen. There will be nobody whose views and judicial philosophy will be satisfactory to the majority Republicans unless whoever the president is happens to nominate Antonin (Short Time) Scalia's left nut. Yesterday, the bare 5-4 majority of Federalist Society Papists demonstrated that it is heedless of concern for women's health, and poised to eliminate the ability of public employees -- and, later, any employees -- from organizing themselves.

(For an interesting historical view, I can highly recommend the redoubtable Thers at Whiskey Fire, who draws on his academic experience to explain how, in regard to human sexuality, the United States Of America is turning into the Irish Free State, circa 1935.)

So there really isn't any excuse any more.

And it's not like the raw material isn't there. In a number of states in which the Democratic candidate was thought to be in desperate trouble, those candidates remain stubbornly—and narrowly—ahead. In the newly insane state of North Carolina, Kay Hagan has opened a little daylight over Thom Tillis. It should be significant that Hagan and Tillis are on opposite sides of the Hobby Lobby ruling. In Arkansas, Tea Party heartthrob Tom Cotton is giving a master class in how a promising candidate can fail to launch, and Mark Pryor has been the beneficiary. (Hint: the farmers you represent will not be pleased if you vote against a farm bill, even if it's because freedom.) Mary Landrieu is still Mary Landrieu, but she's still in a virtual tie. Reproductive rights—as defined yesterday by Samuel Alito—could be enough to save Mark Udall in Colorado, who is running a bit ahead of onetime Personhood champion Cory Gardner. (Gardner already has tried to walk that back, stepping on another rake as he did so.) And, in Michigan, Terri Lynn Land put out a commercial in which she ridiculed the idea of a "war on women." She's now running behind Democratic candidate Gary Peters among the women of Michigan.

So there really isn't any excuse any more.

I occasionally get chaffed by folks for giving out civics lessons but, seriously, we get the government we deserve. The Founders, and those brave people who came later, a group that certainly includes the three Mississippi martyrs and thousands more whose names we don't know, made sacrifices that leave us no alibis. If you live in a state that has restricted the franchise, and that has erected hoops through which you have to jump, then learn how to jump through the hoops and break down those barriers by flooding the polls. If you don't live in a state where it has been made more difficult to vote, then get off your sorry ass.

One of the most striking parts of the PBS documentary was the testimony of Rita Schwerner who, while her husband was still missing, flew to Mississippi to give witness and to make sure her husband's murder would not fade, as so many others did. (She also memorably got in the face of President Lyndon B. Johnson. I've defended LBJ on a lot of issues, but his response to Freedom Summer and, ultimately, to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention, was not his finest hour.) In a recent interview, she explained why she went to the place where her husband already had disappeared.

RITA SCHWERNER BENDER: Yes, but that was after the three of them were missing, and there was enormous attention. And the enormous attention was because two of the three men were white. Nobody had paid very much attention, either on a national level or locally, with the murders of black men and often children who had been - Mississippi had the highest rate of lynchings in the entire country. I think there was something over 500 that were documented. And there were probably many more that never made any kind of recognition.

There really isn't any excuse any more.