First Texas Came for Abortion. Now It's Going After Voting Rights.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

During the Texas state house debate, the GOP assholes banned charges of racism and told the House that no one could accuse the GOP racists of being racists. This bill is very racist and is part of a pattern of racism

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Texas Republicans claim that these measures are necessary to secure elections from threats of voter fraud, even though those same Republicans could find no evidence of voter fraud during the last election. The real reason the Texas GOP has taken these measures is to suppress the voting strength of people of color—and we know that because all these methods have been empirically shown to disproportionately suppress the participation of people of color in elections. When state legislators do something that intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, it’s fair to call those legislators “racist,” even if they would rather people whitewash their true intentions.

Unfortunately, the corporate media has accepted the idea that discriminating against voters of color is just one valid policy option among many. Pieces in both The Washington Post and The New York Times, for instance, framed SB1 as a legitimate side of a “fierce” battle between competing political views, as opposed to the triumph of Jim Crow–style political apartheid. A big part of the Republican game plan is getting their media enablers to treat their racist policies as “normal,” and they’ve been largely successful at cowing the corporate press into doing exactly that.

I skimmed the Freedom to Vote Act and I counted a dozen or so voter suppression provisions in Texas law that would be gutted by that act. Texas had the lowest voter turnout in the nation because the Texas GOP is very good at suppressing the vote of non-whites