How far will Republicans turn back the clock?
If we’ve learned anything at all over the past year or so, it’s that nothing is safe from the ravages of today’s Republican Party. Elections aren’t safe. Look at what they did on January 6. After a defeated Republican president incited a riotous mob of his supporters to attack the Congress of the United States in an attempt to overturn the election he had lost in November, 147 Republican members of congress voted not to certify the electoral outcomes in two swing states that went to Joe Biden, Arizona and Pennsylvania.
According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, by May of this year, 389 bills proposing voting restrictions in 48 states had been introduced by Republicans. By August, at least 18 states had passed laws restricting the way ballots are cast and counted in elections, the latest being the state of Texas, which passed one of the nation’s strictest voting bills at the end of the month.
At the same time Texas was passing new laws restricting voting, its “fetal heartbeat” law severely restricting a woman’s right to abortion was signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Last week, the Supreme Court refused an appeal to stay the law pending a constitutional challenge in court, allowing the law to take effect. According to Axios, more than a dozen states have already passed similar “fetal heartbeat” anti-abortion laws that have been blocked by federal courts. Now that the Texas law has been effectively upheld by the arch-conservative Supreme Court, those states will seek to imitate the Texas law’s enforcement provisions endorsed by the court, potentially allowing their abortion restrictions to go into effect.
An ominous pattern has emerged here. Republican-led states are passing laws that get around civil rights and constitutional protections that have stood for decades, and the current Republican-dominated court is allowing it to happen on a wholesale basis.
The only question left to be answered is how far will the Republican Party go in its challenges to long-established civil and constitutional rights?
We’re getting a hint of what’s to come from the on-going battle over mask mandates in states around the country, believe it or not. The mask and vaccine requirements have a single intent: to save lives. That Republicans would choose for a battleground something as elemental as these protections against a virulent pandemic that has killed more than 630,000 Americans tells you everything you want to know about how far they are willing to push things. Laws and executive orders have been passed in multiple states controlled by Republicans against mask mandates and vaccine requirements in schools, public spaces, and private businesses.
Nearly 1 in 4 new COVID cases were among school age children during the last week in August. According to the Wall Street Journal, 1000 schools in 31 states have been forced to close because of severe increases in COVID infections among children.
And yet in the weeks before schools reopened last month, the states of Florida and Arizona passed anti-mask mandates in schools. Both states are experiencing severe surges in COVID infections in their general population and among school children. Both states have Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures. In Florida and Arizona and elsewhere, Republican governors are using the issue of “parental choice” to justify bans on mask mandates in schools.
“In Arizona we are pro-parent,” Governor Doug Ducey announced at a recent news conference. “I want parents to do what they think is the right thing to do.”
“In Florida, there will be no school closures. There will be no restrictions and no mandates,” Governor Ron DeSantis said in July. “We really do need to make sure that the parents’ rights are protected.”
In both states, individual school districts are defying the state bans on mask mandates and several have gone to court seeking to have the bans overturned.
Wait until you hear the way Ducey and DeSantis responded to the school districts’ defiance of the ban. They are offering school vouchers to parents who want to pull their kids out of school systems with mask mandates and send them to private schools where masks are not required. Ducey is offering a $7,000 voucher to parents who want to take their children out of school systems that mandate masks. In Florida, the state school board is offering vouchers under a program called the “Hope Scholarship” intended for children who have been bulled in public schools and wish to transfer to private schools. The vouchers are to be paid to parents “when a school district’s COVID-19 health protocols, including masking, pose a health or educational danger to their child.”
Sound familiar?
This was the way the South responded after Brown v. Board of Education was passed in 1954: with so-called “parental choice.” When courts began handing down a series of orders desegregating school systems across the South, hundreds of all-white “academies” were established and funded by tuition grants, vouchers, and tax credits. It took a second Supreme Court decision, Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County, to outlaw the practice. The Court found that the private school tuition assistance used to support “school choice,” was a tool to “systematically exclude black children from the educational process.”
Ever since that decision, however, school systems not only in the south but across the country have looked for ways to use vouchers to allow for the use of public funds to help private schools which frequently have discriminatory practices of one kind or another. Now, here they go again, using masks as yet another excuse to allow parents to “choose” to take their kids out of public schools and put them in private schools that are being supported with public monies.
This is what Republicans are doing: nibbling away at civil rights laws and long-established constitutional rights by offering up one scam after another as a way to get around them. And they’ve got a Supreme Court that has shown it is willing to accept patently bogus arguments in order to not only allow the nibbling to go on, but to flat-out destroy the right to vote that was protected for decades by the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court has been willing to let states in the South and elsewhere turn the clock back to the years of Jim Crow when it comes to voting. Do you think they won’t allow Texas and other states to turn back the clock to the years pre-Roe when women had no control over their reproductive lives and their lives were at risk with back-alley abortions?
If they’re willing to use stuff like vouchers to subvert health requirements that save lives like mask and vaccine mandates, do you think they’ll hesitate to go after Brown v. Board of Education and find some scam way to allow legal segregation of schools?
What’s next for these fascist Republican radicals? Do you think they believe the First Amendment is sacrosanct? Why not go all in for public funding of religion? How about benefitting one religion over another? They’ve already put a target on birthright citizenship. What about child labor laws? The minimum wage? Is marriage equality safe from these lunatics?
I don’t think so. Do you?
The ultimate goals of the GOP and the Christian dominionists are the same: to turn back the clock to around 1850. To take away not only women’s reproductive rights but also their right to vote. To Confine voting rights to white Christian males. To make slavery legal again. To make it legal to prosecute and persecute homosexuals. To replace public education with racially segregated religious schools. To prohibit all scientific research except that for developing more deadly weapons. To do away with all gun control and all environmental regulations. To make all religions other than fundamentalist Christianity illegal. Sound ridiculous and far-fetched? Movements to accomplish all of these goals are already happening.
Thanks for making the connection to Brown v. Board of Education. It's important. It's also important to keep pointing out that these people aren't just Republicans, they aren't just anti-democratic, they aren't just misogynist and racist -- they're white supremacists. I've recommended Heather McGhee's book THE SUM OF US before, but I'm doing so again because she nails it with her "drain the swimming pool" analogy: rather than integrate public pools and other public places, the white supremacists (not all of whom were in the South) chose to shut them down, even though they were depriving themselves of the same public goods. They've been at it at least since the Reagan administration, hiding behind slogans like "The government is the problem." With Covid-19, they know they're putting themselves and their own kids at risk, but since they've got it worked out that it's hurting everyone they hate -- people of color, city people, anyone suspected of voting Democratic, etc. -- they don't care.