Hillary Goes Right for Bush's Gut in Voting Rights Speech

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

06 June 15

ALSO SEE: Clinton Is Dead Serious About Confronting the GOP Over Its Voting Rights Abuses

he speech that Hillary Rodham Clinton gave at Texas Southern University on Thursday regarding the right to vote even was better than I expected it to be. It was a thwacking, name-checking jeremiad that took for granted the obvious fact that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that is its only real energizing force, has embarked on a systematic campaign to disenfranchise those voters unlikely to vote for Republican candidates, and that the campaign has been abetted at the highest levels of conservative politics which, in this case, happen to include the Supreme Court of the United States. She talked about how Rick Perry had worked to restrict the franchise in Texas, and how Scott Walker had done so in Wisconsin. Then, she said this.

"And in Florida, when Jeb Bush was governor, state officials conducted a deeply flawed purge of voters before the presidential election of 2000."

Yeah, she went there.

That purge–which is estimated to have eliminated over 12,000 eligible voters from the rolls in a primary that Bush's dim brother won by a margin of 537–was central to the Republican effort to keep the election in Florida within the margin of shenanigans, thereby enabling the Supreme Court to hand the White House to C-Plus Augustus and thereby inaugurate eight full years of utter calamity. That HRC tracks the campaign of voter-suppression back to that ur-event is not merely faithful to history, but also a remarkably shrewd maneuver. From the moment that the Nine Wise Souls of the time cinched The Big Heist, Democratic politicians have been shamefully lax in using that grotesque episode to their advantage, not even when the administration that the Court installed brought so many things to ruin. (The most anger-making segment in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 remains watching all those Democratic senators hide under their desks rather than stand with the likes of John Lewis to contest the results of the 2000 election.) Now, though, HRC has found a way to use it, casting it as an assault on our most fundamental right, while subtly reminding all of us that Jeb (!) was one of the getaway drivers in 2000.

Of course, The New York Times seems to think the trip was all about holding the hands of "forlorn" Texas Democrats. I already hate this campaign so much.