Democrats and the rest of the left have a somewhat bifurcated approach to the vote. During their Jim Crow regime in the South, Democrats specialized in retail vote suppression. When a potential black voter attempted to register that brave individual was met with literacy tests, poll taxes and other extra-constitutional roadblocks placed by a Democrat government between a minority and the voting booth.
And if that wasn’t enough for the black man to take the hint, there was always outright violence as a fallback position.
Today, Democrats have donated their voter suppression identity to an unwilling Republican party. They claim the GOP’s tentative, Tinder-like approach to matching names with faces is “vote suppression” and racism.
When Democrats were the suppressors they applied their genuine vote reduction efforts only to the subset of the population that was non-white. Accommodating Democrats often let White folks vote from the cemetery.
Republicans are much more even-handed. Their goal is to apply perfectly reasonable Voter ID efforts to anyone who wants to vote, whether he’s white enough to join the Klan or dark enough to be fleeing the Klan.
For the left, matching a photo to the individual attempting to vote is tantamount to giving the Gestapo control of America’s polling places. Recently defeated Maryland gubernatorial candidate and former NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis has screamed that Republicans were trying to “lynch democracy” by instructing voters to show ID.
The concern these leftists show for poor ignorant voters who can’t make their way to the DMV for a free ID, are too poorly educated to understand election rules and probably shop at Walmart is particularly touching when one remembers that’s also the left’s description of Trump voters.
But making voting free and universal, like STDs at Burning Man, is only half of the left’s approach. Elections are great. The Voice of the People and all that. As long as the outcome of the election meets with the left’s approval.
If it doesn’t, then that’s where the other half of the left’s modern approach to democracy appears.
Last June the addled electorate in Washington, D.C. (Hillary 91 percent; Trump 4 percent) approved Initiative 77 by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. The initiative was a typical redistribution scheme that took money from people who had it and gave it to people who wanted it, without costing voters a dime. Ballot box theft, in other words.
The text of the bill, according to The Washington Post, “phases out the ‘tipped wage’ that allows D.C. employers to pay workers as little as $3.89 an hour and count tips toward the standard minimum wage of $13.25 an hour. Under the initiative, employers are required to gradually increase hourly wages for tipped workers until they reach what will be the uniform minimum of $15 an hour by 2025.”
Passage of the initiative by uncontrolled voters didn’t sit well with the D.C. city council. So, in a unique twist, they’ve applied a literacy test to the initiative after the election, “...After it passed, some lawmakers insisted there wasn’t a clear voter mandate because of record-low turnout in the June 19 primary and confusing language on the ballot.”
Now the council is going to nullify the result. Seven of the 13 members of the city council have introduced a bill that would overturn Initiative 77 when the bill is voted on this fall. The fact the initiative passed in every one of their districts didn’t deter the Suppression Seven for an instant.
Council member Jack Evans, who’s been on the public teat for 30 years, and whose level of arrogance rivals that Creating the News Network’s Jim Acosta claims he’s carrying out the will of the people, if they were smart enough to know what they thought. “I represent the people; I was elected,” Evans pontificated, overlooking the fact Initiative 77 passed in his district.
Council member Trayon White Sr., who President Trump agrees makes Don Lemon look like a Nobel Laureate, claims the “vote is irrelevant.”
And don’t think this is the first time the council has nullified the will of the people. Since the 80s the politicians have overturned initiatives four times. The most egregious being a 2001 rejection of term limits and an earlier disposal of limits on local campaign contributions.
‘Woke’ Washingtonians who are talking about “flat-out voter suppression” and “openly ignoring votes” haven’t quite made the connection that the only elected officials and bureaucrats that are actively working to nullify or overturn elections are their own beloved leftists.
Trump is still Hitler. Even though Initiative 77 voters and the president have much in common. Both are fighting entrenched politicians, lobbyists, contributors and bureaucrats whose power is threatened by outsiders like grassroots initiative supporters and former reality TV stars.
Michael Shannon is a commentator and public relations consultant, and is the author of “A Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times.” He can be reached at mandate.mmpr@gmail.com.
