As Barack Obama spoke of hope in a Wilmington park named for Harriet Tubman and abolitionist Thomas Garrett, just north of the Mason-Dixon line, some Republicans were still setting loose the dogs along the freedom trail.
Last week, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and some embarrassed but silently capitulating GOP state senators destroyed legislative tradition and subverted procedures intended to protect against "the tyranny of the majority" to pass a regressive voter identification bill. Twelve Angry Democrats in the Senate did their best. But they were outnumbered. In the Right's theory of democracy, minorities should sit down, shut up, and do what they're told.
The U.S. Supreme Court has cleared the way for barriers to voting, of course. The court's opinion in the Indiana voter ID case was bad enough. But Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, did a more honest job of articulating the elitist logic of voter suppression when he penned his opinion approving the Indiana law.
