Voting Rights Killed By Republicans--2022

 To the Editor:

Republican leaders and their largely silent troops in the U. S. Senate are Shocked! Shocked! at President Biden’s calling them out as kin to the likes of George Wallace and Bull Connor.

Such theatrics from McConnell and his wind-up toy pawns in Congress should be laughed away, properly dismissed as just another lame effort to bypass history and the truth. But the fact remains that such false-faced chagrin is chewed on, digested, and spit out in the vomitorium of lies, half-truths, and false exaggerations on social media and Fox News.  The history-challenged among rank and file Republicans take it all in and stagger  their way to a confirmation of their biases and prejudices.

Anyone who is even half-awake to the the ugly vein of racism in American history–slavery, segregation, embedded discrimination– knows that Black citizens in America have struggled mightily to access the vote in the nation of their birth since the 15th Amendment was passed in 1870.  Wallace and Connor and the Republicans in Congress today are only the most recent examples of resistance to this dream of fulfilling democracy’s promise to all Americans. 

It has been said that your real kin share the good and the evil you do in this world of trials. Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Connor cracked skulls and unleashed vicious dogs on children.  McConnell and all fifty Republican senators, every single one,  have just thrown the bones of antiquated filibuster rules into the gears of hope.  They  killed the John Lewis Voting Rights bill of 2022.  The dream of democracy for all Americans once again deferred.