Written by Thomas Magstadt   

They wrap themselves in a constitution we were taught to revere, a constitution they secretly hold in contempt. They are subversives in Armani suits, and they are far more dangerous to the survival of this creaky, old republic than communists and terrorists ever were.

News that a Republican leader recently boasted that Pennsylvania’s new voter identification law will boost Willard Mitt Romney’s chances of winning that key state in the November election is causing a stir among progressives and liberals. Why?

First, a few facts: The loquacious protagonist in this story is a tool named Mike Turzai. Not exactly a household name, unless you happen to live in the state founded by William Penn – you know the state where the “Miracle at Philadelphia” (aka the Constitutional Convention of 1787) happened, where the Liberty Bell proudly displays its crack, and where the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross famously helped launch a revolution.

Turzai is the Republican House Majority Leader in Pennsylvania’s state legislature. As such, he was instrumental in getting House Bill 934 – otherwise known as the Pennsylvania Voter Identification Protection Act – passed. The bill, which was recently signed into law by Republican Governor Tom Corbett, will require Pennsylvanians to show valid photo identification each and every time they vote. Think of it as a form of contraception: like safe sex, this bill is for the voters' "protection".

Imagine: Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross could not vote in Pennsylvania without a valid ID. Something tells me that under the new rules few of Franklin's contemporaries could have voted back then. One can't help but wonder how many eligible white male property owners would have remembered to bring a birth certificate to the polling place. Of course, Betsy Ross and her lot would not get the right to vote in the Land of Liberty until 1920. Likewise, many Pennsylvanians will be turned away from the polls in the upcoming November general election. At least that’s the expectation, as none other than Republican Majority Leader Mike Turzai has confirmed.

Turzai was speaking at a meeting of the Republican State Committee in Hershey when he made the loose-lipped comments that have lately landed him in the national spotlight. Here are the words that actually spilled out of his spleen, passed through his larynx, and came out his oral cavity:

"Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it's done. "First pro-life legislation—abortion facility regulations—in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. (Mitt) Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done." (Italics added)

Allegheny County’s three-member election board has voted to file a lawsuit challenging the new law. The vote was 2 to 1. The two Democrats voted to sue. Republican Heather Heidelbaugh voted against the measure.

So there it is, the Republican strategy for staging a quiet coup by first putting the right to buy votes and bribe politicians in the hands of billionaires (think Supreme Court and Citizens United), then using control of state legislatures thus gained to deny some citizens (the ones least likely to support a proto-fascist party) the right to vote. All the while claiming that the aim of restrictive voter ID laws designed to keep the turnout low is to create the fairest possible playing field for all candidates.

"The fact is, fraud does exist," declared Turzai spokesman, Steve Miskin. "The idea is to stop fraud before it happens." In fact, the fraud has already happened. And it will happen again and again if this new breed of right-wing subversives prevails. It happened in Florida in 2000 when the Republicans stole a presidential election. It’s what just happened in Pennsylvania where the new voter ID law is designed to disenfranchise voters in order to steal another presidential election.

Another fact that can’t be overemphasized: to target elections with the intention of predetermining the outcome it to strike at the very heart of the republic. Republics are not democracies in the strictest, purest sense. A true republic is always based on a “scheme of representation” to borrow a phrase from Madison’s Federal #10. In the United States, the genius of this system has been its progressive movement toward ever more popular representation – representation, in other words, that is truly representative. The integrity of the system, therefore, depends entirely on the integrity of elections.

But the killer fact, the fact behind the facts, the one the mainstream news media dares not report is this: the new Republican party, financed by billionaires like the Koch Brothers and the Adelsons and radicalized by anti-government Tea Party fanatics, has transformed itself into a subversive organization seeking to undermine elections while hiding behind patriotic rhetoric and the very symbols voters associate with America’s birth – ironically, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Don't be fooled when tools like Turzai and the tools of tools like Miskin make soothing noises about protecting voters and the "integrity of the process". That’s how it’s done, that’s how the Big Lie becomes a bludgeon to destroy Truth, discredit Reason, and deny Justice. And that’s how historians may someday record that the brave little republic launched at Philadelphia in 1787, having expanded into a vast empire over the next two centuries, died in 2012; how a subversive organization in the guise of a traditional political party seized power by stealth; and how a dysfunctional old republic called the United States came to be replaced by an aggressive, militaristic corporate-state oligarchy – the Citizens United of America.

All rights are reserved.