Shell Game (Shel %u0261%u0101m), noun, a game involving sleight of hand, in which three inverted cups or nutshells are moved about, and contestants must spot which is the one with a pea or other object underneath; a deceptive and evasive action or ploy, especially a political one.
There was a lot going on in the first 30 days of the new administration. Spats with mainstream media, immigration deportation and lockouts for certain groups, twitter “scud missiles” fired at enemies before dawn and controversy around cabinet picks dominate the news cycles and internet chat rooms.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to focus on the real, or most pernicious, agenda being pushed by the “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” conservative wing of the Republican Party.
The Paul Ryan remnant of the GOP are still in shock that the current POTUS is standard bearer of their party. These so-called conservatives are like the fellow who confesses to his friends that “he’s in love with a rich woman he can’t stand.” Yet they need this independent and impulsive POTUS to progress their most important agenda item — the disenfranchisement of certain types/groups of American voters.
Voting rights, in my opinion, is the “pea” that we must keep our eye on as so-called news is swirling around us with dizzying speed.
Voting is both a responsibility and a right. Citizen participation is key to an electoral democracy. And yes, for sure, non-citizens should not be allowed to participate in our voting process. Yet today, several states have cobbled together some questionable legislation — Texas, for example. Per a recent article in Mother Jones magazine, by Pema Levy, “In 2011, Texas passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country, requiring government-issued identification, such as a passport, driver’s license, military ID, or weapons permit in order to cast a ballot. The law did not allow voting with a university-issued ID. A federal court would later find that 608,470 registered voters in Texas, many of them young and minority voters, now lacked the identification needed to vote. A different federal district court blocked the law on the basis that it discriminates against minority voters.”
What makes this movement to restrict access to voting even more insidious is that it is based on the GOP’s belief that certain elements of society are unalterably opposed to their political philosophy. They have become voter suppressionists, wedded to the notion that a smaller, whiter and more conservative turnout will keep them in power.
Unlike their current flagbearer, whose hubris and self-confidence has him believe that he could convert any potential voter, the conservative GOP aren’t willing to take any chances. And I am not convinced that the Democrats would behave any differently if the shoe were on the other foot. It seems to me that politics has become a professional vocation instead of the service to the people’s ideals that it was meant to be, as our first POTUS, George Washington, demonstrated.
Instead of suppressing voter turnout, we should all be agitating for and promoting a greater turnout. The sad and indisputable fact is that in the 2016 election almost half of the eligible voters decided to sit it out. In a word, that statistic is, or should be, considered shameful in an electoral democracy. So one thing we Independents, Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians should find common ground in is ensuring, as President Lincoln stated, “a government of the people, by the people and for the people” — all the people!