Tyranny of Greed: Trump, Corruption, and the Revolution to Come by Timothy K. Kuhner

Author:Timothy K. Kuhner [Kuhner, Timothy K.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Political Ideologies, Government, Federal, Constitutional, Law, General, United States, American Government, Corruption & Misconduct, Political Science, Capitalism, History
ISBN: 9781503608504
Publisher: Stanford Briefs
Published: 2020-01-15T02:43:10.224392+00:00

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The irony, however, is that Trump and the Republican leadership across the country were well ahead of Hillary in identifying their own basket of deplorables; and unlike her, they succeeded in excluding them from the political process. That brings us to another form of corruption that contributed to Trump’s victory.

In 2008, Obama won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, plus Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. In 2012, he won them all minus North Carolina. The emergence of a viable, progressive black candidate forced modern Republicans to relearn what past defenders of white, wealthy, landowner privilege had always known. If you can’t restrict the participation of minorities and the disaffected poor, Republican victories will become ever more difficult to engineer. The criminal levels of gerrymandering that maintained socioeconomic and racialized patterns of political exclusion in state legislatures and Congress have no efficacy when it comes to the presidency. And so, after Obama’s 2008 victory, Republicans doubled down on the old strategy of restricting voting rights.

Seven of the eleven states with the highest African American turnout in Obama’s first election passed laws that made it more difficult to vote. Nine of the twelve states with the greatest Hispanic population growth since 2010 enacted new restrictions.40 And after Obama prevailed in 2012, the five Republican justices of the Supreme Court joined the political exclusion effort in Shelby County v. Holder.

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T Y R A N N Y O F G R E E D

Their majority opinion struck down the federal preclearance requirements contained in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.41 Pursuant to Section 5, states with the most egregious histories of voter suppression were forced to seek the federal government’s permission prior to changing their election procedures. That provision protected minorities’ right to vote for nearly 50 years until Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion announced, effectively, that racism was over.

The court correctly noted that “voter registration and turnout numbers in the covered States have risen dramatically” since the preclearance provision had gone into effect.42 But, rather than evidence of the beneficial effects of preclearance requirements, the Republican justices considered this evidence of discriminatory effect—discrimination against states that had cleaned up their acts, a constitutional violation of their equal sovereignty by a vindictive federal government.

The same day the Shelby County majority opinion was published, Texas moved forward with a voter ID law that had been blocked by the preclearance section of the act just the year before. In short time, 8 of the other 15 states monitored most closely because of their histories of racist laws followed Texas’s lead.43 Overall, 18 of the 22 states that passed restrictive voting measures since 2012 did so through lawmaking bodies controlled by Republicans.44

But hindsight isn’t necessary to shed critical light on the decision. In the year preceding Obama’s reelection, 180 or more restrictive voting bills cropped up in 41 states. And

M A M M O N F O R P R E S I D E N T

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