Contributors

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

A Debate about Debates

This being debate season, you'd think all the candidates would be fired up about attending debates where they can clearly voice the differences between themselves and their opponents. But across the country, from South Carolina, to Minnesota, to Colorado, Republicans are refusing to participate in debates sponsored by the League of Women Voters.

Some of them are skipping the debates because they're incumbents and are afraid that a debate will only serve to boost their opponents' visibility. But many Republicans have branded LWV as a "liberal" organization and insist the League cannot hold a fair debate.

This is like saying that no male judge can give a woman a fair hearing in divorce court.
 
But Republican ire has also been raised against AARP, for the same reason they're angry with LWV: their opposition to the nationwide Republican push for voter ID laws. These laws will overwhelmingly disenfranchise voters who don't drive, including low-income Americans, renters, urbanites, the elderly, and the young.

LWV has long fought for ballot access, which should be a completely non-partisan issue. Its stand on this issue has not changed. What has changed is that Republicans now see voter ID laws as a way for their party to win despite their flagging demographics (as stated by the Pennsylvania legislator who said that voter ID would allow Romney to win Pennsylvania).

In Minnesota Republicans couldn't get a voter ID law past a Democratic governor, so they passed a constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot this November. Earlier this month a debate on the issue was held between a former governor and a former secretary of state. They're both Republicans, which makes it pretty clear this is not really a partisan issue.

Yet Republicans call LWV and AARP "partisan" for opposing the ballot question, which is not a person and does not belong to a party and is by definition not partisan. But because they drafted the amendment for partisan purposes, they believe that any opposition to it must also be partisan.

Their partisanship is so ingrained that they cannot conceive for a moment that someone could oppose the amendment on the quite rational grounds that you should not embed technical details of election procedures in the constitution of a state. When technology gives us a better and cheaper solution for identifying voters than photo IDs, which are ridiculously easy to forge, we'll have to amend the constitution again!

What's ironic about Republican castigation of LWV is that at the same time Rand Paul Libertarians are citing LWV for the integrity of their debates. The League used to sponsor the presidential debates, but withdrew when they refused to "perpetrate a fraud" in the final Bush-Dukakis debate in 1988. The League also stood up to Jimmy Carter when he insisted that John Anderson (third-party candidate) be excluded from the 1980 debates, which were then held with only Reagan and Anderson.


The issue isn't that AARP and LWV have become partisan, it's that the Republican Party is attempting to win elections by enacting laws that prevent their opponents from voting. It is not partisan to oppose partisan manipulation of the franchise.

3 comments:

juris imprudent said...

I thought you were all in love with bipartisanship?

Chairman Meow said...

Nikto-anus: "It is not partisan to oppose partisan manipulation of the franchise."

So why do you oppose keeping all of Marky's imaginary friends from voting, like they did for Al Franken last time?

What measures do you support to reduce vote fraud? Which have been proposed in your state legislature?

Chairman Meow said...

As I thought, another "shit and run" post from Nikto-anus.