North Carolina Republicans have advanced a bill to cut the early-voting period roughly in half. The time available to vote would be reduced from 17 days before election day to a mere 10. This is a longtime fixation of the Republicans. Early voting is popular with North Carolina Democrats and played a major role in the party’s transformative success in 2008. Lopping off a week from the early-voting period is a straightforward way to suppress Democratic voters. And they’re doing it again.
Did you notice? I barely did. I’ve been preoccupied with reading about the destructive constitutional amendments Berger and his companions are trying to lure voters into enacting. The news about the early-voting bill was tucked well beneath the digital fold in my daily media diet. If the bill passes—and I strongly suspect it will—Republicans will have taken another hack at North Carolina’s dwindling democratic inheritance with hardly any opprobrium at all.
But this is typical, typical. Republicans across the country have emulated the NCGOP’s tactics of voter suppression, gerrymandering, and punitive sore-loser laws to spread the North Carolina democratic retreat to other states. At least five states have enacted “bathroom bills” to terrorize their states’ trans communities, without significant pushback from watchdogs or corporate America. What once made the NCGOP seem uniquely anti-democratic and abusive has become the norm in Republican-controlled states. NC Republicans haven’t kicked their suppressive habits. But they can indulge them quietly, avoiding sanction.
Some people in the NCGOP clearly see this as an opportunity. Assuming—stupidly—that they’ll be able to get away with it, religious-right activists and the singularly aggressive Berger enforcer Ralph Hise have been agitating to reinstate HB2. They are delusional if they don’t think that this will cause an uproar. Republicans in North Carolina have enjoyed the cover offered them by other states to hack away at democracy. But if the state that became an international symbol of bigotry were to reinstate the law that made it famous, the NCGOP’s blessed anonymity would be torn away, and our state would return to the global stage in all its 2016 ignominy.
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