After a weekend filled with listening to the nearly incoherent babbling of either sports fans who think Tim Tebow is the second coming of Jesus, or Republican political candidates pandering, lying, and tripping over social issues like marriage equality and contraception, we're more ready than ever to get back to work today.
If you absolutely need to know who won the two GOP debates this weekend, the short answer is the same one that Republican primary voters keep pushing to the top of their wish list: not Romney. The fact is, Jon Huntsman - the only Republican candidate we see who might give President Obama some real, fair competition in the general election - did very well in New Hampshire over the weekend. Rick Santorum also made a decent showing both days, though his popularity appears to have stalled. Everyone else was hit-or-miss at best.
If you didn't have to watch the debates this weekend, and you prefer to focus on issues of real importance, one of our media colleagues homed in on a topic we agree has significantly more importance than the GOP horserace - the increasingly important topic of voter restriction efforts.
As Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald noted over the weekend, the decision to implement voter I.D. laws by some states - especially those states more heavily controlled by the regressive wing of the Republican party - is effectively a poll tax against minorities, the poor, and the young, all of whom vote significantly more often for Democrats than they do Republicans. Thankfully, in December, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder blocked a version of a voter I.D. law from that bastion of ethics, South Carolina, as discriminatory and unjust legislation.
From the embattled Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, to right-wing state lawmakers in Pennsylvania, conservatives all over the United States are attempting to make it more difficult than ever for many Americans to vote in 2012. Already in Wisconsin, voting rights groups along with the ACLU have filed suit on behalf of Americans with a legitimate right to vote, including 84 year old Ruthelle Frank, who does not have a birth certificate, and never has had one.
The Brennan Center for Justice has done extensive work debunking the propaganda of the right on the nearly non-existant problem of voter fraud. Even the George W. Bush Administration, which undertook a five year investigation of the issue, said that voter fraud was not a real and significant problem in America.
Unfortunately, that didn't stop the extremists on the political right who made a focused and targeted effort last year to restrict voting rights in states across the country ahead of the 2012 elections. More and similar voter restriction laws are being proposed by Republicans nationwide as state legislatures begin to reconvene this year. Sadly, many Americans - including those most likely to have their constitutional right to vote blocked by these new laws - are also unlikely to know that they may have effectively lost that right to vote last year.
We applaud the efforts that voter rights groups like the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty and the ACLU are undertaking on behalf of the poor, minorities, young, and old, to strike down the laws panicked Republicans have set in place to try and unfairly tilt the elections in their favor. Apparently, the only way the twisted party elite in the GOP believe they can win in 2012 is by cheating.
