While working people toil, the richest have never have it so good. It’s time to fight back – our democracy depends on it
he
United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so
few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my
congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and
wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political
crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.
The unfortunate reality is that we are moving rapidly
toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of billionaires
have enormous wealth and power while working families have been
struggling in a way we have not seen since the Great Depression. This
situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Today, half of our people are living paycheck to
paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions
are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured,
and families all across the country are worried about how they are going
to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry
an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their
standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most
obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about
15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death
sentence.
Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so
good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50
wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American
society – 165 million people. While millions of Americans have lost
their jobs and incomes during the pandemic, over the past year 650
billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $1.3tn.
The growing gap between the very rich and everyone else is nothing new.
Over the past 40 years there has been a massive
transfer of wealth from the middle class and working families to the
very wealthiest people in America.
In 1978, the top 0.1% owned about 7% of the nation’s wealth. In 2019, the latest year of data available, they own nearly 20%.
Unbelievably, the two richest people in America, Jeff
Bezos and Elon Musk, now own more wealth than the bottom 40% of
Americans combined.
If income inequality had not skyrocketed over the past
four decades and had simply stayed static, the average worker in
America would be earning $42,000 more in income each year. Instead, as
corporate chief executives now make over 300 times more than their
average employees, the average American worker now earns $32 a week less
than he or she did 48 years ago – after adjusting for inflation. In
other words, despite huge increases in technology and productivity,
ordinary workers are actually losing ground.
Addressing income and wealth and inequality will not
be easy, because we will be taking on some of the most powerful and
well-financed entities in the country, including Wall Street, the health
insurance industry, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and
the military-industrial-complex. But it must be done. Here is some of
what Congress and the president can do in the very near future.
We must raise the minimum wage from the current
starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to a living wage of at least $15 an
hour. A job should lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.
We need to make it easier, not harder, for workers to
join unions. The massive increase in wealth and income inequality can be
directly linked to the decline in union membership in America.
We need to create millions of good-paying jobs
rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure – our roads, bridges, wastewater
plants, sewers, culverts, dams, schools and affordable housing.
We need to combat climate change by fundamentally
transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels towards energy
efficiency and renewable energy which will also create millions of good
paying jobs.
We need to do what virtually every other major country
does by guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right. Passing
a Medicare for All program would end the absurdity of us paying twice
as much per capita for healthcare as do the people of other countries,
while tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or under-insured.
We need to make certain that all of our young people,
regardless of income, have the right to high quality education –
including college. And that means making public colleges and
universities tuition free and substantially reducing student debt for
working families.
And yes. We need to make the wealthiest people and
most profitable corporations in America start paying their fair share of
taxes.
Growing income and wealth inequality is not just an
economic issue. It touches the very foundation of American democracy. If
the very rich become much richer while millions of working people see
their standard of living continue to decline, faith in government and
our democratic institutions will wither and support for authoritarianism
will increase. We cannot let that happen.
Sooner, rather than later, this issue must be addressed.
When Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert decided it would be a good political move to issue a histrionic email—declaring“I
told Beto ‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns. Now we need to tell Joe
Biden”—only hours after the news broke about the latest horrific mass
shooting in a Boulder grocery store, many people took her to task for
the callousness she demonstrated in self-promoting and fundraising off a
tragedy.
That criticism was valid, but it misses a more relevant point.
Boebert did this intentionally, calculating that the blowback she
received would be proportionately less than the credit and acclaim she’d
get for her insouciant disregard of human life. In fact, the blowback
is what she counted on. After all, the desired effect was accomplished:
she’d provoked the “liberal media ” into a wholly predictable response.
In other words, she “owned the libs”—at least in the eyes of the people
who will continue to vote for her.
Boebert knew she’d be criticized, and that the criticism would be
deserved. But by intentionally baiting her own excoriation, she was
reaching for what has now become the sole arrow remaining in the entire
Republican quiver. As expressed cogently by Derek Robertson writing forPolitico, “owning
the libs” is not necessarily a political victory over Democrats, but
rather a demonstration of “a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or
otherwise distressing liberals with one’s awesomely uncompromising
conservatism.”
Robertson’s worthwhile take
on the subject, which promises to be a kind of dissection of the
psychology underlying the “own the libs” phenomenon now ubiquitous
within Republican Party ranks, still suffers from a facile sugarcoating
of the concept by his Republican sources. He quotes Helen Andrews,
editor of The American Conservative, who ennobles the process
of “owning the libs” by elevating it to a virtue: “’Owning the libs’ is a
way of asserting dignity,” she says. “‘The libs,’ as currently
constituted, spend a lot of time denigrating and devaluing the dignity
of Middle America and conservatives, so fighting back against that is
healthy self-assertion; any self-respecting human being would … Stunts,
TikTok videos, they energize people, that’s what they’re intended to
do.”
That’s not really true, though. Whatever outrage that liberals direct
toward “conservatives” is usually based on plain-old empirical
evidence. If we tend to categorize Donald Trump’s supporters as racist,
for example, it’s because they either affirmatively endorsed (or turned a
blind eye to) racism by voting for Trump, who clearly demonstrated his
own embrace of racism, over and over. We don’t seek to “devalue” their
dignity, because we don’t recognize any “dignity” there to begin with;
their actions are reprehensible, they hurt other people and they should
know better. If “dignity” is even implicated, it’s cognizance of their
own lack of it—their anger at their sorry-assed selves being
revealed—that compels them to respond with a defensive, mocking
nihilism.
Still, to his credit, Robertson traces the origins of this phenomenon
back to the McCarthy era. Then, conservatives would justify Sen. Joe
McCarthy’s worst excesses by intoning that “at least he stood for
something,” whereas his opponents allegedly had no similar certitude of
purpose. But while McCarthyism may have been the historical precedent to
what we see spewed ad nauseum in virtually all conservative media
content today (particularly since Trump, who elevated the heinous and
offensive to an art form), it now seems that that “owning the libs” has
become the entire rationale for a Republican Party singularly bereft of
any ability to perform its supposed intended function of governing on
behalf of the American people.
Politico’s Robertson also quotes Marshall Kosloff, who comes closer to the truth.
“It basically offers the party a way of resolving the contradictions
within a realigning party, that increasingly is appealing to down-market
white voters and certain working-class Black and Hispanic voters, but
that also has a pretty plutocratic agenda at the policy level.” In other
words: Owning the libs offers bread and circuses for the pro-Trump
right while Republicans quietly pursue a traditional program of
deregulation and tax cuts at the policy level.
So “owning the libs” is, at the very least, a scam, a feint, a mask
for the Republican Party’s utter indifference to the real-life concerns
of their constituents, for whom elected Republicans have had absolutely
nothing to offer. It’s distracting entertainment substituted as policy.
But is it more than that?
As the Biden administration enters its third full month, it’s useful
to recount exactly what Republicans have done in the interim. Thus far,
the only reaction from the right to the progressive measures being
instituted on an almost-daily basis by the new administration has been
an exercise in outrage politics. From the truly ridiculous, such as the saga of Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head,
to the truly dangerous—such as anti-immigrant racism and Fox
News’ over-hyped “border crisis” or the simplistic hatred of
anti-transgender bias.
All of these tactics have something in common: They’re performative
exaggerations of social and cultural shifts that in reality have little
or no tangible impact upon the daily lives of Republican constituents.
Show me a Republican whose lives have actually been affected by an
undocumented immigrant (few Republicans know any, and fewer still aspire
to the “jobs” they fill), by a children’s book few if any Republicans
have ever read, or by a transgender child
playing sports (few Republicans have ever encountered one). These are
all red herrings—shiny objects for the right to hold up and point to
with one hand, while the other hand is busy with more substantive goals,
such as impeding people of color from voting.
But they’re also symptomatic of a party that has completely abandoned
“policy” as a governing principle. Instead, what we see is a Republican
Party that has committed itself to one goal only: maintaining its grip
on power by totally committing itself to inflammatory cultural issues.
In its drive to maintain power, the GOP has adopted the same tactics of far-right parties in Europe, stoking
grievances with apocalyptic, xenophobic rhetoric against immigrants
and LGBTQ people, whom it attempts to marginalize as “social deviants”
who are a threat to the “purity” of the population.
As was observed by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein last year,
the modern Republican Party now closely resembles the neo-Nazi and
white nationalist parties now emergent in Europe, such as Germany’s AfD and Hungary’s Fidesz, both in its ideological makeup and tactics, as it relentlessly tacks rightward.
What we see in the behavior of these proto-fascist European parties
is another, peculiarly European version of the “own the libs” approach,
by mocking the Holocaust, for example, as reported by the BBC.
The party's leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, Björn
Höcke, once described Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of
shame" and called for a "180-degree turnaround" in Germany's handling of
its Nazi past. Picking up the same theme, Alexander Gauland trivialised
the Nazi era as "just a speck of bird's muck in more than 1,000 years
of successful (German) history."
Similarly, those who resist or object to these tactics are drummed out of the party apparatus altogether.
The AfD has managed to attract voters from the centre right and
even the centre left but in the words of Verena Hartmann, a moderate MP
who left the party in January 2020 because it was becoming too extreme:
"Those who resist this extreme right-wing movement are mercilessly
pushed out of the party."
Sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it?
Writing for Salon, Heather Digby Parton shrewdly
documented this phenomenon at CPAC this year, in which Republicans,
hoping to take up the coveted mantle of Donald Trump, spent nearly all
their energies playing up to the crowd’s laundry list of hot-button
grievances. Seldom if ever venturing into policy matters, the tone and
tenor of those speaking reflected the prevailing sentiment of the
attendees: “They don't care if these people are right or wrong, it's
their unwillingness to back down no matter what that they admire.”
Parton cites Soviet-born author Masha Gessen,
who shows how the “own the libs” phenomenon has its counterpart among
the far-right parties that have arisen in former Communist states such
as Hungary, as well as Western European countries now under siege by
right-wing “populism.” In particular, Gessen quotes Balint Magyar, who
characterized the appeal of such parties as “an ideological instrument
for the political program of morally unconstrained collective egoism."
Magyar suggested reading the definition backward to better understand
it: "The egoistic voter who wants to disregard other people and help
solely himself can express this in a collective more easily than alone."
The collective form helps frame the selfishness in loftier terms,
deploying "homeland," "America first," or ideas about keeping people
safe from alien criminals. In the end, Magyar writes, such populism
"delegitimizes moral constraints and legitimizes moral nihilism."
The whole point of “owning the libs” is to project an in-your-face
disregard to norms of decency and morality that most people have grown
to expect from our civil society. In this mindset, “Fuck your feelings”
becomes a litmus test of moral nihilism toward others, a requirement to
confirm one’s party loyalty and be part of the “club.”
The difference between the Unites States and Europe, however, is that
unlike Europe, the U.S. political landscape is essentially limited to a
two-party system. The Republican Party has moved so far to the right
that the American public is now left with a choice between a relatively
moderate Democratic Party and an extreme, far-right Republican Party,
with nothing at all in between. Because our American electoral system
unduly favors low-population “conservative” states, providing them equal
representation in the U.S. Senate, and because of partisan
gerrymandering ensuring that the GOP maintains rough parity with, if not
domination of, Democratic voters who tend to be clustered in
metropolitan and suburban areas, these two parties are afforded equal
time and attention by the traditional media and the political process.
But they are not equal, in numbers or motivation. One party
represents far more voters, as shown in the national popular vote in
election after election for the past 20 years, while the other
represents a dwindling and aging voter base. One party represents
inclusion and social progress, the other openly embraces xenophobia,
racism, and voter suppression. With its new penchant for denying the
legitimacy of elections, and its now-open embrace of paramilitary
organizations and white supremacy, the Republican Party is rapidly
moving toward the textbook definition of fascism, if it has not already arrived there.
“Owning the libs” may seem funny, and even harmless, to those who
practice it or profit by it. The reality is that a party whose messaging
now relies solely and exclusively on establishing a “litmus test” that
deliberately and intentionally abandons moral constraints and human
decency is hardly breaking new ground. In fact, it’s following a tired
and familiar path, conditioning its followers to dehumanize those who
oppose them politically, while instead embracing autocracy and,
ultimately, fascism.
The Associated Press questions in a March 20 article if the Biden administration “should have been better prepared” to shelter larger numbers of unaccompanied children arriving to the U.S.
in search of safety. It appears it had been trying to do just that,
as it joined career officials during the transition to warn the prior
administration of the need to increase Health and Human Services (HHS)
Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) capacity.
NBC News says in its new report
that while officials with the Biden transition team “began sounding an
alarm” in early December, then-HHS Secretary Alex Azar did not begin
“the multiweek process of surveying and choosing new sites” until just
days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration, on Jan. 15. “They were
sitting on their hands,” the report quotes a transition official saying.
NBC News reports that the recommendations from the transition team last year were “based
on a growing trend of unaccompanied minors crossing the border that
began to emerge in the late fall, and it was communicated to Trump
officials in multiple meetings, multiple times a week.” But the report
said that the previous administration was apparently confident it didn’t
need to increase HHS capacity.
That administration had for most of 2020 been using the novel coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to block unaccompanied children from their asylum rights, in a Stephen Miller-pushed policy that was subsequently blocked
by a federal judge in November. Pandemic restrictions also lowered
capacity limits at HHS facilities, but the administration “did not
account for Covid-19 social distancing restrictions that would keep
facilities from using every bed available,” the report said.
Continued warnings went unheeded, with one official telling NBC
News it was "irresponsible of the Trump administration not to listen to
us when we were throwing up red flags." But while that former
administration was also sitting on its hands, it’s not hard to believe
that it was also setting the stage to point fingers.
As far back as the summer of 2020, former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Thomas Homan was on state television warning about a so-called “Biden effect.” BuzzFeed News immigration reporter Hamed Aleaziz on Wednesday also noted that a court filing from ORR’s former acting director was “basically predicting that capacity would be an issue back in November.”
Per recent numbers from CBS News, about 11,000 unaccompanied children were in HHS custody as of last weekend. Another 5,000 children were in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) waiting to be transferred to HHS, with many being held beyond the legal time limit.
In an effort to get kids out of these border facilities as quickly as
possible while they wait to be placed with sponsors (who are often
parents or relatives already here), the Biden administration has begun
holding some in convention centers and so-called influx facilities.
But because they’re unlicensed, advocates have urged that they be
used only when there are no other options, and for as short a time as
possible. “When government custody is the only option, children
should be placed in small, licensed, non-profit shelters or foster
care,” Katy Murdza writes for Immigration Impact. “Influx shelters should be a last resort.”
“To reduce the time children spend in ORR custody, measures can
be taken to release them as quickly as possible to family members or
guardians that meet the legal protections for child safety,” Murdza
continues. “A positive recent example is ORR’sannouncementthat
it would pay for a child’s flight to their destination if a sponsor’s
ability to pay was delaying their release. But more measures must be
taken.” The Biden administration also recently issued guidance intended to speed up the safe release of children who have parents or relatives who are already in the U.S.
“If this is successfully executed, it will have a great impact on the number of kids in custody,”tweetedBridget Cambria, an immigration attorney and advocate for detained children.
Sorry
Republicans, but Biden's transition team warned Trump officials of the
need for more facilities to house migrant children. This little girl,
by the way, was photographed months ago when she was being held during
Trump's administration.
Women
embrace next to a makeshift memorial outside a King Soopers grocery
store in Boulder, CO, on March 23, 2021 where multiple people, including a police
officer, were killed in a shooting last week. (photo: Michael Ciaglo/USA
Today)
he
scene looked heartbreakingly familiar: the rumble of tactical vehicles,
the swarm of law enforcement officers, the long ribbons of yellow
police tape and the eyewitness descriptions thick with residual terror.
Monday evening’s deadly shooting in Boulder, Colo., which resulted in
the deaths of 10 people, including a police officer, was the second mass
shooting in a week.
A dreadful normalcy has returned. Muscle memory
demands that we lament it — even as all evidence suggests that many of
us are unmoved by death. It doesn’t cause behavior to change. It doesn’t
shake people from their moorings at the center of their own universe.
Death is not a deterrent.
In the days after a mass shooting, the nation mourns
and those who died are named. The hearts of our elected officials have
been broken so many times that surely they must be in shards by now. The
flags are lowered to half-staff. And the president speaks. Joe Biden, a
man who is expert at consoling, did the best that he could to say
something true that did not sound like a cliche.
“I even hate to say it because we’re saying it so
often: My heart goes out. Our hearts go out for the survivors, the — who
had to — had to flee for their lives and who hid, terrified, unsure if
they would ever see their families again, their friends again,” Biden
said Tuesday afternoon from the State Dining Room. “The consequences of
all this are deeper than I suspect we know. By that, I mean the mental
consequences — a feeling of — anyway, it just — we’ve been through too
many of these.”
The images from these shootings can be gut-wrenching.
In video and still images, people see shellshocked survivors pouring out
of the school, the night club and, this time, the grocery store.
There’s blood in these images, sometimes even the blurred image of one
of the deceased. There’s nothing sanitized about them. The shooting may
happen behind closed doors, but the death is in the open. The terror
rises off the survivors like a stench; the sound of fear reverberates.
And still the deaths don’t spur action to make the
guns harder to get, to make the guns less efficient. The president, some
politicians and many activists cry out for “common sense” gun laws to
stop the senseless death even as it seems that they are pleading with a
country that’s engaged in a completely different kind of calculation.
Increasingly it seems that we simply do not care about
the other person, that other family, someone else’s child. The self is
everything. It’s freedom and liberty, whims and desires. Community
doesn’t extend beyond one’s front door. Everything else is someone
else’s concern.
Studies have shown that the human brain can lose the
capacity to process death, to absorb the meaning of it, when the numbers
of the dead begin to reach staggering levels. We have been told that
the heart can go numb in response to such enormity. This is one of the
explanations for why people have continued to engage in risky behavior
during the coronavirus
pandemic even as it has become ever clearer how best to protect our
fellow Americans. The end is on the horizon, and if people simply wear a
mask, social distance and persevere with patience, we might get there —
not all of us, sadly, but most of us.
Yet unmasked revelers crowded onto the streets of
Miami Beach. The very real possibility of death has not been a
deterrent. The community didn’t matter as these partyers and tourists
ostensibly shot a different kind of deadly slug into the Florida air.
More than 544,000 deaths in the United States due to
the coronavirus have not sent everyone scurrying to protect their
neighbor. To follow common sense recommendations. To center the
community instead of the individual.
If that number is too big for people to grapple with,
what is the right number? What number is small enough that each death
touches the heart and therefore motivates people to act, to be better?
Is it 58 — the number of people a man killed at a Las Vegas country
music festival in 2017? Is it 49 — the number killed in a shooting at
Orlando’s Pulse nightclub
in 2016? Or perhaps the motivating number is nine, which accounts for
those who were fatally shot in Charleston during a prayer meeting. Is it
eight — the number who were killed in Georgia just last week? It surely
can’t be one because there are singular deadly shootings in communities
all too often and still nothing happens. Nothing.
We have not gone numb to death. To “go numb” suggests
that once there was feeling, once there was sensitivity. When was that?
Perhaps it was back in 1968 when, after the deaths of John F. Kennedy,
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Congress passed gun laws that
formed the basis of federal regulation that has been regularly eroded
and only occasionally strengthened. We haven’t cared for a long time.
Not when the dying were schoolchildren, people in the midst of prayer or
contented folks just living quiet lives.
Today, some in this country argue against gun laws
with a ferocity that moves beyond a right to hunt rabbits, or defend
oneself against an assailant or one’s property in the face of an
intruder. We refuse to relinquish the delusion that 21st-century America
is a frontier town in which gunplay is a form of justice.
Many insist that the very real possibility of mass
deaths does not outweigh a personal inconvenience or the setting aside
of a myth. Give up large-capacity magazines. Wear a mask. These deaths
matter.
We are not numb to death. We stubbornly, selfishly
dismiss it. We shake it off. But there is always an assault that has the
capacity to bring an individual low. Some bracing gut punch that stings
and startles. The pain might finally register in a way that is deep and
lasting. And that person begins to feel something.
But that may require death coming directly to their
own doorstep, since that’s the only one that, for many of us, seems to
matter.
On Thursday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a viciously anti-voter
law that would, among other things, penalize people for simply handing
out water or snacks to people waiting in hours-long lines. (Lines that
are long by design.) In fact, the bill is so blatantly designed to
suppress the vote in Georgia that it includes nearly 100 pages of new voter restrictions.
There is no question these restrictions are racist in nature, from
the first to the last. As Nsé Ufot of The New Georgia Project told Kos and Kerry Eleveld on an episode of The Brief,
this bill and others like them are a “whitelash” response to the
success of Stacey Abrams, The New Georgia Project, Fair Fight, and the
campaigns of Sens. Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
As bad as this bill is, there is another sinister element to this
bill signing, which took place as six white men looked over the shoulder
of Kemp. Philadephia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noticed the
painting behind Kemp and rattled off a Twitter thread about the
historical significance of that painting and the plantation depicted in
it. Buckle up, folks—this is going to be infuriating.
1.
You've probably seen this picture of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and his
gaggle of white men signing the state's voter suppression law -- the
new, new Jim Crow. But there's a shocking angle to this story that you
haven't heard. Sit down for this one...
While Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was signing Georgia Republicans’ sweeping voter suppression
bill into law, in a private ceremony behind closed doors and surrounded
by white men, a Black legislator was being cuffed and dragged away by
law enforcement because she knocked on that closed door. Rep. Park
Cannon faces
two felony charges for doing her job, representing her constituents
whose vote Kemp and his fellow Republicans are determined to strip away.
Those felony charges are legally questionable, because the Georgia
constitution says legislators are "free from arrest during sessions of
the General Assembly," but that didn't stop the state troopers from
arresting her or apparently authorities from charging her. Her offense
was trying to throw some sunlight on what clearly Kemp wanted to keep
hidden: His signing the blatant voter suppression into law while seated under a painting of Callaway Plantation, a notorious slave plantation. Because of course that's what all those white Republican men revere.
The law itself attacks voting rights
in nearly every way possible. It requires registered absentee voters to
submit a driver's license or other documentation to check their
identity, replacing the signature—the one thing that every voter
has—matching process. There are more than 200,000 Georgia voters who do
not have a driver's license or state identification number. The deadline
for absentee ballot requests is set 11 days before the election, so
people experiencing an emergency or other situation in those 11 days
that might prevent them from voting on Election Day are out of luck.
Early voting for runoff elections, like the one that sent two
Democrats to the U.S. Senate, has been reduced from three weeks to as
little as one week, and requires runoffs to be held four weeks after the
general election, giving little time for early voting. The new law
gives the State Election Board the unilateral power to remove county
election boards and replace them with their own managers, and counties
will have to provide election results in 6 days instead of 10. It forces
election workers to count ballots all in one go, now allowing them to
stop until all ballots are finished.
It also limits ballot drop box locations. Georgia Republicans have
done everything in their power to force voters to stand in long lines on
Election Day, and then to cap it all off, made it illegal for members
of the public to give food or water to those voters standing in line.
President Joe Biden is right. "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is," Biden said in his news conference Thursday. "It's sick."
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, joined
Cannon. He is her pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church. "Today is a very
sad day for the state of Georgia," he said. "What we have witnessed
today is a desperate attempt to lock out and squeeze the people out of
their own democracy."
Elections lawyer Marc Elias, the lead attorney who beat back the
ridiculous flurry of law suits from Donald Trump and Republicans over
November's election, has filed suit
in federal district court, charging that the new law violates the U.S.
Constitution and the Voting Rights Act. He filed that suit on behalf of
the New Georgia Project, Black Voters Matter, and the student
organization Rise.
This bill, Elias told
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "shows the ingenuity of the Republican Party to
find ever-new ways to attack voting and attack democracy. … [T]hese laws
are all aimed at disenfranchising Black voters and also young voters,"
he said. "The role of the Courts are to protect fundamental rights when
politicians fail them, and right now Republican politicians around the
country are failing voters and failing democracy and we have to turn to
the courts."
There's also Congress, where those Republicans aren't failing voters.
They're blatantly helping suppress them. The For the People Act and the
John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act have not yet come to the
Senate floor, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is promising they will
and soon. So in that sense, Georgia might just have done voting rights a
favor. They've made the issue as crystal clear as it could be.
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It's time for the 1% to feel The Bern! 
he
United States cannot prosper and remain a vigorous democracy when so
few have so much and so many have so little. While many of my
congressional colleagues choose to ignore it, the issue of income and
wealth inequality is one of the great moral, economic and political
crises that we face – and it must be dealt with.
