Last Call

Want to know where Republicans would like to go on the issue of voter suppression?  Rep. Steve King just dropped a major clue at a House hearing this week on a balanced budget amendment:

As I roll this thing back and I think of American history, there was a time in American history when you had to be a male property owner in order to vote. The reason for that was, because they wanted the people who voted — that set the public policy, that decided on the taxes and the spending — to have some skin in the game. 

Now we have data out there that shows that 47 percent of American households don't pay taxes, 51 percent of American wage-earners don't have an income tax liability. And it's pretty clear that there are a lot of people who are not in the workforce at all. In fact, of our unemployment numbers — that run in the 13 or 14 million category — when you go to the Department of Labor Statistics and you look at that data, you can add up those that are simply not in the workforce of different age groups, but of working age, add that number to the number of those who are on unemployment and you come up with a number that was just a few months ago 80 million Americans. Just over a month ago that number went over 100 million Americans that aren't working.

Now I don't think they're paying taxes. But many of them are voting. And when they vote, they vote for more government benefits.

Why should the parasites and the looters and moochers get to vote, anyway, right?The irony of course is that if not paying income taxes because you're not employed means you can't vote, a number of Teabaggers on say, Social Security, would be disenfranchising themselves.  The bigger issue of course is that during the historical period King was talking about, it was only white men who could hold property or vote for that matter.  Steve King there seems awfully wistful about returning to that era.

"What if that were transferred into a society like today and it were [only] taxpayers that were voting?"

Why it would  look an awful lot like the 1780's.  I'm honestly not sure what's more repugnant, the fact that a sitting member of Congress is publicly entertaining the notion of eliminating half of America from the voter rolls, or the implication that the poor deserve no representation in our democracy because they don't have "skin in the game".

Like I keep saying, if you refuse to recognize any other difference between the Dems and the GOP, it's the GOP's constant assault on voting rights that are indisputably awful.