This MAGA fixation proves dystopia is now at our doorstep

Source: Raw Story · Bias: Far Left

Summary

The dining room table is the civic and moral hearth of our house on Constitution Street. Upon it rest a stack of utility and other bills to be sorted and paid (with cursing as necessary), issues of various magazines including The New Yorker and Fortean Times, a dog-eared Tom Wolfe anthology, and a shaker of sea salt, a squeeze bottle of raw honey and a red-topped dispenser of soy sauce. There are chocolates still being rationed from Valentine’s Day, an airplane plant, and dozens of other artifacts of daily living.The thing that is new on the table is Kim’s application for a passport.I picked it up when I went downtown to the post office the other day, knowing she might need it. She has studied it and made lists of documents required, some of which are at hand and others which are not. She has her birth certificate, but unless she can find legal evidence of the dissolution of her past marriage, she’ll have to request those from Missouri.It’s not that we’re planning a trip out of the country, but that Kim would like to keep voting. She’s cast a ballot in every general election since she turned 18 and became eligible, but MAGA-inspired legislation kicking around in the U.S. House and Senate would, if passed, impose onerous new rules that require proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. For married women who have taken a husband’s last name, now or in the past, one of the few viable options would be a passport.Dubbed the SAVE Act, for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,” the legislation would do just the opposite and disenfranchise millions. The House recently passed, 218-213, an amended version of the act that replaces the document requirement with a photo ID provision and directs states to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2012, Kansas has required voters to show photographic identification at the polls. Eleven states, including Kansas, have already agreed to hand over voter data to the feds.The SAVE Act has no chance of passage in the Senate — for now.But Republicans have ratcheted up rhetoric around the bill to further Trump’s (and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s) claims of massive voter fraud by undocumented migrants. These claims have been repeatedly and soundly debunked, with a recent government review flagging only about 1 in 5,000 registrations. But even that number may be overstated. The verification tool used by the government is prone to mistakenly flag some citizens as potential noncitizen voters. With MAGA’s legions preparing for an all-out assault on voting rights before this fall’s midterm elections, it seems prudent for Kim to have her newly-minted passport in hand before going to vote.This worry, on an otherwise bright February week in east central Kansas when snow and ice was just a memory, was yet another example of dystopia at the doorstep. This “show me your papers” strategy is one long favored by authoritarian regimes, past and present. The goal is to discourage voting by making it as difficult, or as risky, as possible. Also, the SAVE Act neatly folds into the Trumpian obsession with who is and who isn’t American, a centerpiece of his tinpot regime from the beginning of his second term. The Supreme Court will hear challenges to his executive order to end birthright citizenship on April 1. This is so mind-numbing I don’t even have a joke for the date. Words and reason appear poised to fail us, given the current bench.Among the reasons I rely so heavily on books in these columns is for the galaxy of ideas they contain. Books are the cultural currency of a rational civilization, and when you find the right book to cite, it either invokes a knowing response in the reader or, if they are unfamiliar with the title, a curiosity about the work mentioned. There are a handful of books that nearly everyone has read, or has been forced to read in high school, ranging from Fitzgerald to Orwell, that are particularly effective in illustrating a point.Federal District Judge Cynthia Rufe also reached for George Orwell in issuing her Feb. 16 decision that the Trump administration could not scrub references to George Washington’s enslavement of nine Black people from a National Parks Service site in Philadelphia.Rufe prefaced the ruling with a passage from Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four now existed,” Rufe began, “with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts.

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This MAGA fixation proves dystopia is now at our doorstep
Raw Story

This MAGA fixation proves dystopia is now at our doorstep

Far Left

The dining room table is the civic and moral hearth of our house on Constitution Street. Upon it rest a stack of utility and other bills to be sorted and paid (with cursing as necessary), issues of various magazines including The New Yorker and Fortean Times, a dog-eared Tom Wolfe anthology, and a shaker of sea salt, a squeeze bottle of raw honey and a red-topped dispenser of soy sauce. There are chocolates still being rationed from Valentine’s Day, an airplane plant, and dozens of other artifacts of daily living.The thing that is new on the table is Kim’s application for a passport.I picked it up when I went downtown to the post office the other day, knowing she might need it. She has studied it and made lists of documents required, some of which are at hand and others which are not. She has her birth certificate, but unless she can find legal evidence of the dissolution of her past marriage, she’ll have to request those from Missouri.It’s not that we’re planning a trip out of the country, but that Kim would like to keep voting. She’s cast a ballot in every general election since she turned 18 and became eligible, but MAGA-inspired legislation kicking around in the U.S. House and Senate would, if passed, impose onerous new rules that require proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate. For married women who have taken a husband’s last name, now or in the past, one of the few viable options would be a passport.Dubbed the SAVE Act, for “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility,” the legislation would do just the opposite and disenfranchise millions. The House recently passed, 218-213, an amended version of the act that replaces the document requirement with a photo ID provision and directs states to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. Since 2012, Kansas has required voters to show photographic identification at the polls. Eleven states, including Kansas, have already agreed to hand over voter data to the feds.The SAVE Act has no chance of passage in the Senate — for now.But Republicans have ratcheted up rhetoric around the bill to further Trump’s (and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s) claims of massive voter fraud by undocumented migrants. These claims have been repeatedly and soundly debunked, with a recent government review flagging only about 1 in 5,000 registrations. But even that number may be overstated. The verification tool used by the government is prone to mistakenly flag some citizens as potential noncitizen voters. With MAGA’s legions preparing for an all-out assault on voting rights before this fall’s midterm elections, it seems prudent for Kim to have her newly-minted passport in hand before going to vote.This worry, on an otherwise bright February week in east central Kansas when snow and ice was just a memory, was yet another example of dystopia at the doorstep. This “show me your papers” strategy is one long favored by authoritarian regimes, past and present. The goal is to discourage voting by making it as difficult, or as risky, as possible. Also, the SAVE Act neatly folds into the Trumpian obsession with who is and who isn’t American, a centerpiece of his tinpot regime from the beginning of his second term. The Supreme Court will hear challenges to his executive order to end birthright citizenship on April 1. This is so mind-numbing I don’t even have a joke for the date. Words and reason appear poised to fail us, given the current bench.Among the reasons I rely so heavily on books in these columns is for the galaxy of ideas they contain. Books are the cultural currency of a rational civilization, and when you find the right book to cite, it either invokes a knowing response in the reader or, if they are unfamiliar with the title, a curiosity about the work mentioned. There are a handful of books that nearly everyone has read, or has been forced to read in high school, ranging from Fitzgerald to Orwell, that are particularly effective in illustrating a point.Federal District Judge Cynthia Rufe also reached for George Orwell in issuing her Feb. 16 decision that the Trump administration could not scrub references to George Washington’s enslavement of nine Black people from a National Parks Service site in Philadelphia.Rufe prefaced the ruling with a passage from Orwell’s dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four:All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.“As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four now existed,” Rufe began, “with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts.

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