Sam Bee asks "How the fuck is this legal?" about the GOP's voter suppression fuckery
With the most pivotal midterm elections in a long, long time coming up on November 6, Samantha Bee took some time on Wednesday’s baseball game-delayed Full Frontal to examine how both political parties are approaching the sacred institution of free and fair elections with equal degrees of impartiality, fair play, and respect for participatory democracy. Oh, right, one of those parties is the GOP who, as Bee put it, “know they’re not popular enough to win without cheating” and are therefore engaged in a “Mitch McConnell devil’s triangle” of gerrymandering, blocking judgeships, and voter suppression. And, as Bee notes with characteristic acid fury, Republicans have given up any pretense of being subtle about their naked power grabs.
Take North Dakota, where a Republican legislature passed a completely unjustified and arbitrary voter residency law disenfranchising thousands of Native American residents. That came after Senator Heidi Heitkamp won her last election based in part on her support from Native American voters there. Noting that the supposed easy steps to reinstatement involve a process that Full Frontal staffers were completely unable to track down, Bee proclaimed that the officials involved simply don’t know how the process is supposed to work “because it’s not supposed to.”
Then there’s Georgia, where Democrat Stacey Abrams’ campaign to become the nation’s first-ever black woman governor has been imperiled into a dead heat with Republican “Civil War statue who wished to be a real boy” candidate Brian Kemp’s move striking 53 thousand Georgia citizens—over 70 percent of whom are black—from the rolls based on a surgically targeted “exact match” voter ID rule. Well, Georgia’s secretary of state, whose job it is to ensure honest elections there will surely put a stp to that undemocratic bullshit right? Oh, because the Republican Party isn’t even trying to hide their blatant corruption any more, Georgia’s secretary of state is—Brian Kemp. Bee, citing the fact that a state that’s 30 percent black just kicked 70 percent of black voters off of its “no funny black person names” voter list did some analysis, musing, “So, if I do the math in my head, that’s . . . fuckin’ racist.” Concluding her segment by exclaiming that voting should be a right of all Americans and not, as the GOP would have it in their match-fixing ethical bankruptcy, a racist, cherry-picked, partisan privilege, Bee told viewers that, if they’re among those lucky enough to have been spared this spate of Republican ratfuckery, they’d better go out and fucking vote on November 6.
Check to see if you’ve been mysteriously disenfranchised here.