Senate Republicans are probably quite proud of themselves these days for killing the For the People Act, the voting rights protection law that had passed in the House, by voting unanimously in late June to not even let the legislation come up for debate on the Senate floor. But they blew their big chance to be weasely scumbags.
About a week after President Joe Biden took office, several disability rights organizations issued a statement expressing concern over a provision in the bill mandating the use of paper ballots in elections. The statement said, “It must be made abundantly clear that the ability to privately and independently hand mark, verify, and cast a paper ballot is simply not, and will never be, an option for all voters. . . . For example, a blind voter cannot privately and independently mark a paper ballot with a pen.”
The statement notes that many people who cannot read or write on paper because of their disabilities can only cast secret ballots electronically. “A fully accessible voting system by Federal law must ensure the voter can receive, mark, verify, and cast the ballot without having to handle paper,” it said.
In June, just before the Senate vote, these same organizations issued another statement reiterating the same concerns. It said that in the versions of the bill that passed the House and were before the Senate “the fears of disability advocates on how the paper mandate will impact voters with print disabilities have not been addressed and only minimal changes have been made to the mandate to protect the rights of voters with disabilities.”
This presented Senate Republicans with the perfect opportunity to once again be weasely scumbags by claiming the phony moral high ground while shooting down the bill. They could’ve cited these statements and shed some crocodile tears for disabled voters as they righteously claimed to be defending our right to vote.
They could’ve amplified the warning in the second statement about how requiring paper ballots will “disenfranchise” a lot of disabled voters. Of course, this would be taking the statement grossly out of context, since the disability rights advocates also praised the bill as a “well-intended and important legislation” that includes ”specific provisions enhancing access for voters with disabilities.”
But shamelessly distorting things by taking them way out of context is what weasely scumbags do. Hypocrisy is their hallmark. Whenever they lovingly embrace so-called right-to-work legislation, they always say they’re standing up for the rights of working people.
And here Senate Republicans had a beautiful chance to do it again by pretending that they give a flying crap about disabled people. I mean, they’re cranking up the B.S. to full blast anyway when they try to justify racist voter suppression laws by saying they’re restoring the integrity of the electoral process.
Why not crank it up to a new level?