Michigan’s Republican-led House on Wednesday night approved a strict voter identification proposal over strenuous objections from Democrats who argued the plan could disenfranchise properly registered voters.
Michigan voters without photo identification could still cast a provisional ballot under the controversial legislation, but they would have to bring an ID to their local clerk’s office within 10 days of an election in order for their vote to count.
It was really not an exaggeration on Trump's part (or Michele Bachmann's) that given demographic trends, 2016 could've been the last election, if not one of the next two, where the Republicans had a close to even shot at winning the Presidency, mostly because of the country approaching the point when whites are no longer a majority.
It looks like Trump won Michigan by about 10,000 votes. In 2020, if Trump does a glaringly bad job (which he likely will), and/or the Democrats just make some tweaks at GOTV in Michigan, that should be a margin that's easy to overcome. But this bill, which will become law, could keep hundreds of thousands of Democrats from having their votes counted in Michigan. And the new conservative Supreme Court will uphold this law, and many others.
I'm really at a loss as what to do. This is going to happen across the country. "Legal" or not, this is cheating. Without the voter ID laws, voter purges, voter caging, "cross-check," incredibly unfair (and racist) gerrymandering, Democrats would have won pretty much every election, at least the quadrennial ones, since 2000. The Democrats would have the White House, the Supreme Court, the House (easily), and the Senate. But now the Republicans have ways to cement the opposite.
It's not even just a matter of how to prevent this. It's how to react to it on a level as a citizen of this country. Every single item I mentioned in the previous paragraph is cheating. It may be ruled constitutional, but it's cheating. Which makes our leadership morally illegitimate. Prior to 2016, that made for bad government. Now it's led to something damned close to fascism.
I'm not exaggerating. In fact, I think I'm understating. We're in for the battle of our lives, and it's really an asymmetric one.
