Georgia legislator who tried to witness Brian Kemp signing Jim Crow law still facing two felony charges

Park Cannon is facing 8 years in prison for peacefully knocking on the governor’s door during the signing ceremony of his vote suppression law:

Cannon is now facing two felony charges from last week’s arrest — obstruction and preventing or disrupting a General Assembly session, according to the Fulton County Department of Public Safety website.

She told reporters Thursday that she is facing eight years in prison for those charges, which she called “unfounded.” Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr did not respond to a request from Yahoo News for comment for this story.

As Ed Kilgore says, this is all the product of Georgia Republicans who combined their natural instincts to suppress Black voters with their desperate need to kiss Donald Trump’s ass and validate his false claims of voter fraud:

But instead of playing their shot as it lay, Georgia Republicans tore each other apart over Donald Trump’s mendacious election “fraud” claims and his subsequent efforts to overturn the Biden victory, with many GOP elected officials and activists gleefully attacking Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp, both Republicans, for certifying Biden’s victory. Trump himself dominated the Senate runoffs and may well have depressed Republican turnout by constantly claiming that the vote in Georgia was “rigged.”

After the catastrophe of losing control of the Senate for their party, which in turn led to the passage of Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Georgia Republicans probably should have licked their wounds and begun healing their divisions heading toward 2022. But no — instead, they made the Georgia General Assembly the national showcase for GOP voter-suppression measures. There was hardly an evil idea for making voting more difficult, particularly for minority citizens, that did not get introduced by some Republican legislator during its 2021 session, up to and including a total end to no-excuse voting by mail, a ban on Sunday in-person early voting, all sorts of burdensome and redundant voter-ID requirements, and attacks on the jurisdiction of Democratic county election offices. The nastiness progressed to include the cartoon-villain idea of making it a crime to give food and water to voters in the long lines that Black people notoriously have to endure in Georgia.

All this obnoxious activity was obviously the product of Trump’s election-fraud claims, since there were no documented cases of problems with Georgia’s 2020 elections other than the aforementioned long lines. So the Georgia GOP was very conspicuously exposing itself as doing bad things in a bad cause.

That this might backfire on them, at least in the short-term, doesn’t make it any less disgusting. And if Georgia is a decisive state in the 2024 presidential election, by very afraid. Because the problem here is that Trump is much more symptom than cause:

The Republican Party’s enthusiasm for vote suppression predates Trump, and it has become a core tenet of the party’s post-Trump-presidency identity. Vote suppression is an issue that brings together the Trump-adoring base and the elites who tolerated him as a necessary evil — if they don’t agree that Joe Biden stole the last election, they do agree on passing laws that will make it harder for Democrats to win the next one.

The fight over vote suppression also brings to the fore the party Establishment’s belief that whatever bad odor they acquired during the Trump years should immediately be dispelled. It was intolerable enough that large sectors of respectable corporate opinion shunned them over their support for a racist, authoritarian president. Now they expect to be treated as respectable again, not as a party still teeming with racist, authoritarian elements.

The problem is, this is exactly what they are.