“There are many things open to debate in America, but the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them.”

Thus spoke Attorney General Merrick Garland last Friday in Washington D.C. as he announced his decision to direct the Justice Department to investigate the anti-Constitution end-around that the feckless Republican Party is attempting to subvert the voting rights of millions of Americans.

Former president Donald Trump’s election loss last year continues to reverberate throughout the delusionary segment of his flock desperately clinging to the idea that victory was “stolen” from him by President Joe Biden, simply because the former Liar-In-Chief says that it’s so, without a scintilla of personal or governmental evidence. And this has led to a plethora of Red state anti-minority legislation whose sole purpose is making it harder for Black and other minority groups to practice their Constitutional right to vote guaranteed by Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From Florida to Texas, Georgia to Iowa new regulations are being enacted reducing voting hours, making electorate IDs more stringent, curtailing mail-in and advance voting, and (amazingly) preventing outside groups from furnishing water and refreshments to voters waiting in long lines.

The GOP knows full well that the larger the voter turnout nationally the less chance they have of winning, proven conclusively last November with the millions of mail-in votes necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the tremendous effort by Stacy Abrams in Georgia and other states’ activists to enjoin one of the largest African-American voter turnouts ever.

And the fact that the latter turnout was fueled by the four years of anti-minority racism, misogyny and incompetence by the Trump Administration is totally lost by his base….they only want a return to the neo-Fascism of 2017-2021, and if it takes overturning a fair election (which thankfully failed), doing phony post-election “audits” like the ongoing one in Arizona, or weakening the rights of 14% of our population from voting, so be it.

The sad part about America is that the majority of our White population has changed very little ideologically since the Freedom Rider days of the 1960s, when Black and White activists alike were arrested, roughed up and had their vehicles firebombed routinely by rioting low-grade White segregationists whose sole purpose was to prevent the Black vote from gaining traction in America, especially in our southern states where racist hatred festered to an obscene level.

Biden’s proposed FOR THE PEOPLE ACT, whose tenets would’ve halted all the right-wing anti-voter subterfuge taking place, has been staked and ultimately defeated by the Washington Senate Republicans. They are being aided and abetted by Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who are both standing four square against ending the filibuster, a tool that the GOP has signaled that they’ll use to block the prevention of the new Republican voting restrictions. And this is why Garland’s and the Justice Department’s new scrutiny of the forty-seven states proposing these changes is so important.

The obvious fact that this is ultimately a specific civil-rights issue is made clear by Garland already doubling the staff numbers of his civil rights division. Guidelines governing what is allowable to tighten their voting rules are being sent to these states, and it’s anticipated that fierce court battles are coming up soon mainly concerning the struggles between early/mail-in voting rules, reduction of poll hours as well as the use of “observers” practicing any intimidation of voters, a ruse that Trump used in a number of states to throw some fear into queueing citizens.

But in sum, the Justice Department is duty-bound to do their due diligence here, and all in response to Trump’s Big Lie that won’t go away until Trump does. And the other Big Lie is the one circulating from the national GOP that these new restrictions are needed to safeguard public confidence in America’s voting fairness. In reality the only Americans complaining about said process are the Trump-lovers falsely clinging to HIS Big Lie.

We can all look forward to those court battles to come, some led by the ACLU who will be kept extremely busy for the next couple of years, to head off the GOP’s targeting of the November midterms next year, and having their restrictions in place that would make it virtually impossible for a Democrat to win in the Red states affected.

This bears watching by all of us, as the Washington Republican party would like nothing more than a return to the Bad Old Days of African-Americans turned away at the polls, with the resultant GOP election victories. And with Juneteenth coming up this Saturday the 19th, the timing couldn’t be more apt.

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