Don't Sing Along With Mitch

 "Well the concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans." Senator Mitch "Rhymes With Mitch" McConnell said this after a vote to move the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to the Senate floor failed this past week. This came from the Senate Minority Leader who is, perhaps unfairly compared to a turtle, failed to acknowledge first and foremost the irony of his position. Senate Minority Leader. The Minority, Republicans, managed to scuttle legislation from moving through Congress to become law. If only minorities had this kind of power across the United States. 

I'm not talking Republicans here. I am talking about Americans here, a point which seems to have evaded Mitch. 

I am also amazed that a person of no particular color can speak to the concerns of people of color. The man for whom this legislation was named is no longer around to debate, so the point, for Mitch, seems to be moot. Or maybe it's the statistics that trouble him. Like the ones that say that, since 2000, black eligible voters have accounted for nearly half of Georgia's electorate's growth. Voter ID laws, redistricting, access to polling place information and translated voting materials have been shown to be factors in keeping eligible voters away from the polls. 

Maybe Mitch didn't get a chance to finish his thought. Maybe what he meant to say was that African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans, "and we're going to do everything we can to stop that." It was back in 2013 when the United States Supreme Court backed its truck over the original Voter's Rights Act, but that was after we had already elected an African American president, so everything was cool. Right?

Now it is the voters who bear the responsibility of proving that they have been disenfranchised. If this sounds a little like a corpse bearing the responsibility for proving that it was murdered, then you may not be in a place to go along with Mitch. Oh, and in 2016, a federal court in North Carolina found that state's newly minted voter ID law was created to "target African Americans with almost surgical precision." Targeting with surgical precision sounds like it should be in a tag line for a Jason Bourne movie, not in laws restricting votes. Votes that, have historically leaned toward the Democrats, which makes Republicans worry. And that group is growing. Which makes Republicans terrified. 

Or at least that's what statistics show.