Earlier this week, during a campaign stop, Hillary Clinton made some strong and very welcome comments on how we should be expanding voting rights and making it easier for all Americans to vote. And it didn’t take long for the GOP Presidential contenders and their right wing jackass allies to start attacking the former Secretary of State for what she said.
Specifically, Clinton said, in part:
?Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of Americans from voting. What part of a democracy are they so afraid of??All of these problems with voting just didn’t happen by accident.”
Clinton also called for automatic voter registration, 20 days of pre-election early voting, and that polling places stay open on evenings and weekends. She remarked:
?We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person to vote than the right of a corporation to buy an election.?
Big Amen to all of that! You would think all politicians and all parties would welcome the expansion of voting rights in a nation that likes to champion itself as a bastion of freedom that all the world should emulate. But you would be wrong. Very, very wrong.
No sooner had Clinton made her comments than 2016 GOP candidates lined up to criticize her for wanting to make voting more accessible. Ohio Governor John Kasich said:
?Don’t be running around the country dividing Americans. Don’t come in and say we are trying to keep people from voting when her own state has less opportunity for voting.?And she is going to sue my state? That’s just silly.?
Next up was Wisconsin Governor?Scott Walker, who chimed in with this:
?Hillary Clinton’s rejection of efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat not only defies logic, but the will of the majority of Americans.?Once again, Hillary Clinton’s extreme views are far outside the mainstream.?
And former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is so stupid he cannot even recall what three agencies of the federal government he would eliminated if elected, remarked:
?When I got on the airline to come up here yesterday I had to show my photo ID. Now, Hillary Clinton may not have had to show a photo ID to get onto an airplane in a long time.?The people of the state of Texas is who she’s taking on. Because that was a law that was passed by the people of the state of Texas. She just went into my home state and dissed every person who supports having an identification to either get onto an airplane or to vote.?
As you might expect, the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who watch Fox News 24/7 and think George W. Bush is the greatest President since Washington also couldn’t resist getting on the Internet and vomiting up their racist trash. Here are some of the comments they posted:
Reading these comments makes me angry, but it also makes me sad. Until we all come to the realization that we are all Americans and all in this together, I truly fear for our future.
Voting is the most basic of rights we were given by the Founding Fathers. To deny it to anyone, to make it more difficult for anyone, to discourage any American from this exercise of democracy is to desecrate the memory and the work of so many over the years since we gained our independence. People have died for this right, and we owe their sacrifice the respect it deserves.
As Benjamin Franklin so eloquently said:
“We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
