Trump: Republicans should be able to vote safely, everyone else needs to choose between their franchise and their health
It’s very clear how many Republican states will handle voting in a pandemic: Republican constituencies will get no-excuse mail ballots, while everyone else gets screwed:
“Mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt,” declared President Trump earlier this week. When a reporter asked how he could reconcile that position with the fact that he had personally voted by mail in the last election, Trump replied, “Because I’m allowed to.” This perfectly circular logic — if more voters were permitted to vote by mail, they would also be “allowed to” — seemed not to satisfy him. Trump has refined his view, explaining that casting a ballot by mail is fine for members of the military and senior citizens, but is “ripe for fraud” when used by others…
Trump is not even attempting to formulate a facially neutral principle. He is simply asserting that members of the military and senior citizens — constituencies that lean Republican — can be trusted not to commit voter fraud, but that constituencies that might vote Democratic cannot. He is willing to support accommodations to allow Republican-leaning voters to vote without risking their health, but refuses to support any such accommodations for Democrats. (Trump campaign officials already confirmed this to Politico — they will allow mail voting for senior citizens, but not others.) The travesty that was Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin is his plan to win in November.
Make sure to click through for a National Review hack asserting that if Wisconsin voters don’t like “your franchise or your life” their remedy is the ballot box not the courts, although in fact Republican legislature has foreclosed that remedy and held a rigged election in order to ensure that this would remain true. This was among the dumbest arguments ever when Felix Frankfurter made it 60 years ago and it remains so today.
Needless to say, the idea that elections conducted with some groups having access to safe voting and others being excluded is consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Fifteenth Amendment, or the Guarantee Clause is preposterous on its face, but with Chief Justice Roger Taney IV and his Four Swinging Neocofederates in firm control of the Supreme Court LOL nothing matters.