You know Republicans have gone around the bend when they’ve become too extreme and too anti-democratic (small “d”) for Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner, one of Wisconsin’s most conservative politicians for 10 years in the Legislature and 37 years representing the state’s most Republican congressional district.
Sensenbrenner published an op-ed piece in The New York Times last week futilely advocating for congressional passage of a bill restoring federal oversight of state election law changes that a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down three years ago when it gutted key provisions of the U.S. Voting Rights Act.
Sensenbrenner said the need for oversight to prevent states from disenfranchising minority voters was demonstrated by the disastrous Arizona primary, where thousands of Latino voters in Maricopa County stood in lines extending for blocks for as long as five hours after county officials reduced the number of polling places to 60 from 200 in 2012 and 400 in 2008.
Republican-controlled states, including Wisconsin, have passed numerous restrictions on voting in recent years—strict photo ID requirements, cutting hours for early voting and curtailing voter registration drives by citizen groups in addition to reducing polling places.
Many of these obstacles to voting disproportionately affect racial minorities—along with other specific groups such as students, the poor and senior citizens—who Republicans consider more likely to vote Democratic.
“Ensuring that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, deterrence and prejudice is a basic American right,” Sensenbrenner wrote. “I would rather lose my job than suppress votes to keep it.”
What a novel idea from a Republican elected official these days. Most of Sensenbrenner’s Republican compatriots have no qualms about repeating the party’s phony cover story for passing voter suppression laws. Republicans say they’re trying to prevent voter fraud, which they claim to gravely fear even though they’ve been unable to produce any evidence it’s a problem.
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Everyone in America knows they’re lying, but most of the media quote them as if they were telling the truth.
It’s good to know there are still a few Republicans around who not only refuse to lie for their party, but really believe voting is one of the fundamental principles of American democracy.
Dishonesty is not a conservative political value. Throughout his career, Sensenbrenner has never taken a backseat to anyone in his right-wing political views.
Sensenbrenner was one of the authors of USA Patriot Act, the gross intrusion into Americans’ private lives passed in the legislative panic after 9/11. It was not until Sensenbrenner learned of the National Security Agency’s massive collection of all our phone records that he saw any need to rein in law enforcement under the act.
It could be argued Sensenbrenner was even responsible for feeding the ugly hatred toward immigrants spiraling out of control in the current Republican presidential race.
In 2005, the Republican House of Representatives passed Sensenbrenner’s bill criminalizing the presence of undocumented immigrants in this country. Although Republicans routinely call such immigrants “illegals,” being in this country without documentation is not really a crime. It’s a civil offense like a traffic violation.
Sensenbrenner’s bill criminalizing such immigration, which died in the U.S. Senate, could have imprisoned 11 or 12 million immigrants. The U.S. incarceration system, already the largest on earth, currently holds about 2.2 million people.
A New Voting Rights Act?
Despite being a hard-core conservative, Sensenbrenner wrote that he considers the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965 to be “vital to this country’s commitment to never again permit racial prejudice to determine who has access to a ballot.”
He said that was why he supported reauthorization of the act in 1982 shortly after he joined Congress and again in 2006 as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
In 2013, Sensenbrenner said, the Supreme Court rendered meaningless one of the law’s strongest voting protections by eliminating as outdated the formula used by the U.S. Justice Department to determine which states needed to get federal “preclearance” for voting law changes because of “a documented history of discrimination.”
Originally, those states were mostly in the Deep South where racist white officials used lynching, terrorism and other illegal means to disenfranchise African Americans. Ironically, Arizona had been added to the list in 1975 for discriminating against Latino and Native American voters.
Sensenbrenner said one of Congress’ highest priorities before the November election should be passage of the Voting Rights Act of 2015 he introduced, which creates a new formula requiring federal preclearance of voting changes in any state that has racially discriminated against voters five times in the most recent 15 years.
Fat chance of that happening. Sensenbrenner noted his bill has more than 100 co-sponsors and only 13 of them are Republicans.
Sensenbrenner is one of a tiny minority of Republicans these days who still appears to believe in democracy, fair elections and the right of every eligible citizen to vote regardless of race, religion or likelihood of voting Republican.
