GOP: Democracy isn't working for us
by digby
This really says it all. As the wingnuts get more and more desperate, they simply have to choice but to rig the game as much as possible. Via TPM:
A former top staffer for a Republican legislator in Wisconsin suggested this week that GOP legislators were motivated to pass the state’s tough photo voter ID law because they believed it would help them at the ballot box, an account he expanded on in a Wednesday interview with TPM.
Todd Allbaugh, who served as chief of staff for state Sen. Dale Schultz (R) until the legislator retired in 2015, first made the claims in a Tuesday Facebook post that caught the attention of national voting rights experts.
In the post, Allbaugh recalled a 2011 caucus meeting of GOP state senators about the voter ID legislation. Allbaugh said during that meeting, some Republicans were “giddy” over the legislation's "ramifications" and the effect it would have on minority and young voters.
Once he left politics, Allbaugh opened a Madison, Wisconsin, coffee shop, where TPM reached him over the phone and he elaborated on those claims.
“It just really incensed me that they started talking about this particular bill, and one of the senators got up and said, ‘We really need to think about the ramifications on certain neighborhoods in Milwaukee and on our college campuses and what this could do for us,’” Allbaugh said. “The phrase ‘voter suppression’ was never used, but it was certainly clear what was meant.”
While Schultz, Allbaugh’s former boss, has notably spoken out against more recent restrictions on voting, he voted for the 2011 bill. According to Allbaugh, at this point in the point of meeting, Schultz brought up his own concerns with the voter ID legislation.
“He was immediately shot down by another senator who said, ‘What I am interested in is getting results here and using the power while we have it, because if the Democrats were in control they would do they same thing to us, so I want to use it while we have it,'” Allbaugh said.
Allbaugh said Schultz left the meeting in frustration after that, while he stayed behind to continue taking notes.
“It left a pit in my stomach to think that a party that I had worked for for years and years and years was literally talking and plotting to deny someone, a fellow citizen, their constitutional right,” Allbaugh said.
My favorite thing is that they claim the Democrats would do the same thing to them. But they wouldn't, seriously. It's not that they are so honest and uncorrupted. It's that they have created a truly diverse coalition of voters that mirrors the country as a whole. There is no advantage in keeping people from voting because they have no way of knowing which people could be in their camp. That's the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural future of America. Republicans are a party of the past and the only way they can bring it back is to deport millions of people from the country, ban millions of people from entering the country and stop millions of people who don't already vote for them from voting.
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