Trump’s anticipatory lies

It is the political equivalent of premature ejaculation: arriving at the end long before you or anyone with whom you are presently involved would like.

Donald Trump is trying to take the hurt off his likely loss in Pennsylvania by telling his followers that if he loses there, it will mean the election was rigged. In Wilmington, North Carolina, he whined that the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals’ action in tossing out North Carolina’s brutally restrictive voting access law (the court said the law targeted black voters “with almost surgical precision” to achieve “purposeful racial discrimination”) would make it possible for people to ‘vote fifteen times for Hillary.’”

This is, of course, all nonsense. Trump will lose Pennsylvania, not because of hanky-panky, but because a majority of voters in Pennsylvania don’t like him. As of this writing he is 10 points down, and he hasn’t yet gone into a single debate with Clinton. If he does show up for the debates, she will eat his lunch: She is intelligent, informed, disciplined, and experienced; he is bluster and factless. 

His current fans will continue to adore him—they are more like a rock concert audience than a political crowd—but he has, in all likelihood, topped out. 

According to PolitiFact, Trump lies 91 percent of the time and Hillary Clinton is more honest than any candidate in the 2016 campaign, Democrat or Republican. Those facts, at this point, won’t change very many people’s minds: Those who have been seduced by the Republicans’ 24-year smear job against Clinton will not be unconvinced. And Trump’s faithful are like the Rodney King jury. The single piece of damning evidence in that trial was a bystander video. It showed a bunch of Los Angeles cops brutally beating and tasering a black man on the ground, offering no resistance, just trying to protect himself from the pain. The LAPD lawyers showed the tape to the jury dozens of times, so many times it simply stopped having meaning for them. Trump’s lies, for his faithful, are like that: He tells them so often that they no longer catch their attention. 

One thing Trump did get right

But Trump got something right about voting in America now. It is rigged. Not at all in the way he prefers to talk about it. (“It’s not about you, Donald.”) It is, rather, rigged against the rest of us.

Votes aren’t being stolen from the candidates. They are being stolen from us.

The vote is rigged in at least three ways. Democrats are not entirely innocent in this, but mostly this is Republican rigging favoring Republican candidates.

1) Gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act

One of the Johnson administration’s great accomplishments was passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which made it far more difficult for states to keep minorities and poor people out of the voting booth. But on June 25, 2013, in Shelby County v Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated the part of the Voting Rights Act that required states that had discriminated most in the past to get federal approval before changing voting access. 

Almost immediately, many of the states that had been the target of the 1965 Voting Rights Act set about writing laws that would keep African-Americans and Hispanics out of the voting booth. The most egregious of the new laws were written in Texas and North Carolina.

Both of those laws, which unambiguously targeted minorities and the poor (who tend to vote Democrat), have been tossed out. Other cases are still pending. 

North Carolina’s governor would like to appeal that Fourth Circuit ruling, but with the current 4-4 split in the Supreme Court, he won’t get anywhere. Were Antonin Scalia still alive, that appeal might have been fast-tracked and the political game in North Carolina, a swing state now tending toward Clinton, might be very different right now. 

2) Gerrymandering

If you look at a map of Congressional districts in the United States, hardly any of them make sense in terms of population or geography. State legislatures get to redraw Congressional district boundaries after federal census years, so whatever party is in power in the statehouse immediately sets about drawing boundaries that work to its political advantage. 

Three of the country’s most gerrymandered districts are in North Carolina (see Christopher Inghram, “America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts,” Washington Post, May 15, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/15/americas-most-gerrymandered-congressional-districts/ ). All three of those districts break up Democrat enclaves so they are a minority in Republican enclaves. 

Republicans aren’t the only party to have worked at gerrymandering. But they’re been better at it than the Democrats. As several political commentators have pointed out recently, in recent years, Democrats have focused on national elections, while Republicans has focused on national and state elections. If you control the State House in a census year, you control the Congressional districts for a decade.

That is why only 37 or 38 of the 435 Congressional seats are really in play this year. In a well-gerrymandered district, a member of the House is far more likely to retire than to be voted out, however incompetent he or she might be, 

3) Disfranchisement

Nothing in the US Constitution prohibits convicts or former convicts from voting. Many states do.

Maine and Vermont are the only two states that allow inmates, probationers, and parolees to vote. Twenty states do not allow people serving time to vote, but let them vote when they complete their sentence. In some of those states, people on parole are technically still serving their sentence, so they don’t get to vote. Other states only allow some people with felony convictions to vote.

Until recently, Florida and Virginia permanently disenfranchised all people with felony convictions. Last April, by executive order, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to more than 200,000 individuals. The Republican legislature voted to nullify that. McAuliffe then set about signing individual pardons for each of those individuals. 

Felony disfranchisement in America is not color-blind. People of color are 30 percent of the American population but 60 percent of the prison population. One in three black men will spend time in prison.

George W. Bush “won” Florida by 537 votes in 2000. How would that state, and the election, have gone, had not more than a million black Floridians been locked out of the voting booth?

What this election is really about

We have three key ways in which large sections of the electorate are prevented from voting or forced into bogus districts so their votes hardly count: the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and statehouse gerrymandering and disfranchisement. 

The states that are the primary villains in all of this are not going to fix these problems on their own. Why would they? They have arranged things so that it is impossible for their citizens to fix these problems. The people disfranchised cannot vote to get their voting franchise back. The people gerrymandered into a political ghetto cannot vote to make their votes represent where they live. The people locked out of the voting booth by the surviving responses to Shelby cannot vote to undo Shelby.

There is one place all of these perversions of our political process can be fixed: the Supreme Court. Each of these issues—Shelby, gerrymandering, disfranchisement—provides the basis for a Supreme Court case.

A court dominated by likes of the late Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and the almost-mute Justice Clarence Thomas would change none of those things. A court dominated by the likes of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Justice Elena Kagan very well might.

This election isn’t just about a narcissist with bad orange makeup who lies so often his supporters no longer pay any attention to it, or a woman of astonishing achievement who has been lied about relentlessly for 24 years. It is a foundational election, one about our democracy itself. 

Bruce Jackson is editor-at-large for The Public.