Paxton's Voter Suppression

In a throwback to the Civil Rights era Texas Republicans are using the power of government to once again suppress the vote of minority Americans. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent armed teams to the homes of half a dozen Houston area members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Squads of armed officers banged on doors at 6 a.m. to execute search warrants and seize cell phones and other possessions at the homes of folks like 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, apparently for exercising her right register people to vote.

Voter suppression is a tried and true method for retaining power. Paxton’s actions are suspect given that the allegations are related to the 2022 election and it seems strange that after nearly two years his investigators suddenly got to the point where they are ready to seized “evidence” given that we’re ramping up for another election. We also know that while Paxton’s office has investigated hundreds of people for voter fraud and other election related crimes spending millions of dollars yet has only led to a handful of convictions. None of those alleged “crimes” involved enough voters to even change the election outcome of a city council member let alone a member of congress or the governor.

Paxton has proven time and again that he’s willing to use Texas taxpayer dollars to fund specious lawsuits and prosecutions if it means helping Republicans win elections. In 2020 he sued four other states claiming they didn’t run their elections properly. Needless to say all four were swing states where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump. All four lawsuits were laughed out of court, just like so many of his other stunts.

It’s important to remember that Paxton is so corrupt that he was impeached by the Texas House with plenty of Republicans supporting that vote last session.

Paxton is satisfied with just harassing a handful of voting rights activists, he is also threatening to sue Bexar, Travis, and Harris Counties, where Biden/Harris won by large margins, over their efforts to send voter registration cards to everyone. Apparently Paxton doesn’t want private groups to help people register to vote but he also does not want the government to people register to vote.

These tactics are the same sort that led to the Voting Rights Act and in fact were Section 4b of that legislation still in force today many of the Republican voter suppression tactics would be prohibited and the Department of Justice would have sued to enforce it. Unfortunately a decade ago the Supreme Court held that even states with a history of voter suppression can’t be pre-empted from doing it again.

Texas isn’t the only state where Republican voter suppression is going today, Ohio and Alabama are in the act along with several other southern states. Voter suppression can’t just be overwhelmed by getting out the vote, remember that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes and still lost the election due to the electoral college.

It’s going to take patriotic Republicans like former Vice President Dick Cheney who has put aside his partisanship and endorsed Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to restore out democracy.

Treasonous Republicans

As a nation we expect our leaders to be patriots. Many Republican elected officials make a big deal of wearing flag pins on their lapels as if that alone makes them patriots. It’s unfortunate that Republican presidents and vice-presidents over the last 50 years haven’t lived up to our expectations.

In the final weeks leading up to the 1968 presidential election President Lyndon Johnson was working to end the war in Vietnam. During negotiations Republican candidate Richard Nixon contacted the leadership of South Vietnam in an effort to delay a peace treaty in order to gain political advantage in the United States. Nixon offered the South Vietnamese leaders a better deal than Johnson if they would boycott the talks. Nixon violated the Logan Act which prohibits private citizens from trying to “defeat the measures of the United States” or otherwise meddle in its diplomacy. The war dragged on for another five years at a cost of thousands more American lives. It has taken nearly 50 years for the proof to be made public due to Nixon’s efforts to keep his files and those of his top staff secret. This act of treason is proven in great detail by the notes that long time Nixon aide and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman took at the time and which were stored in Nixon’s presidential library.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries took 52 American hostages from the American embassy in Tehran. Carter ran for re-election in 1980 and worked hard to negotiate the release of the hostages. As the campaign heated up Republican candidate Ronald Reagan became concerned that Carter might manage to get the hostages out in time for it to affect the outcome of the election. The Reagan campaign created a private network of military and intelligence contacts to monitor Carter administration efforts and feed that information to Reagan's people. The Reagan team also began their own secret negotiations with an Iranian faction led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time Iraq had invaded Iran and they desperately needed weapons. Reagan’s team offered American weapons and spare parts as well as the release of billions of Iranian government monetary assets held in US banks if only they would hold onto the hostages until after the American presidential election. The hostages were released minutes after Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981.

George W Bush took office in 2001 and later that year hijackers from Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda brought down New York’s Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon taking the lives of nearly 3000 people. It wasn’t enough to invade Afghanistan which was harboring bin Laden, Bush also felt the need to invade Iraq. In order to sell the war his team claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, in particular that they were building nuclear weapons. As evidence they claimed that Iraq was importing uranium ore from Niger. The CIA asked the former ambassador to Gabon, Joe Wilson, to go to Niger and use his local contacts to investigate the claims. When Wilson filed his report it caused a firestorm and in an effort to discredit him Vice President Dick Cheney outed Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative. It was Cheney aide Scooter Libby who took the fall but it’s clear Cheney committed treason.

With Trump the apple didn’t fall far from the Republican tree as there is growing evidence he too negotiated with hostile foreign powers to affect the outcome of our election. Now Trump appears to monetizing his treachery using the trade war he started to wrangle a $500 million loan from China.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - May 25, 2018