Why Won’t Conservatives Denounce Voter Suppression?
Why Won’t Conservatives Denounce Voter Suppression?
Why won’t some principled conservative commentator like David Brooks or Michael Gerson denounce the Republican party’s voter-suppression efforts? I find this genuinely puzzling.
I don’t expect actual GOP politicians to condemn the voter-suppression movement within their ranks, because they have a partisan interest in, well, suppressing votes. The fewer low-income African-Americans and Latinos show up at the polls, the better off they’ll be. As I’ve noted before, that sort of thinking was implicit in Mitt Romney’s now-famous “47 percent” disquisition (i.e., if an unacceptably high proportion of Americans are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims” who “are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it” and can’t be persuaded to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” then you really don’t want them venturing out of doors on Election Day).
But for anyone who’s free to contemplate voter suppression from a more disinterested journalistic perch, the utter phoniness of the GOP’s movement to squelch voter fraud must surely be obvious. It’s not as if conservative commentators are going out of their way to defend these practices, as they might be expected to do if they actually believed all the GOP’s partisan nonsense about large-scale voter fraud, which has been disproven time and again. The only such commentator I can think of who buys into it all is John Fund. He’s made this his personal crusade, and I don’t sense that his arguments command much attention even on the right.
The bad motives of the voter-fraud movement have gotten pretty hard to ignore.
