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I've been following the Recent Unpleasantness in Georgia with rapt fascination. The state has become the poster child for voter fraud- just not the fraud that they think they mean.
In 2018, a Black Democrat almost defeated a Republican for governor. Brian Kemp was not the GOP incumbent; he had something better for these purposes. In 2017, he was Georgia's Secretary of State, giving him power over state voter rolls, and with one keystroke of an ENTER, he exited over half a million voters from the rolls because they had not voted in enough prior contests. By at least one report, more than 100,000 of them would have otherwise have been eligible to have voted in the 2018 statewide races. Kemp also delayed processing of new registrations. In the end, he won by fewer than 55,000. You'll never guess which candidate was impacted more negatively by the purge. If you click that link, it'll show that Kemp singlehandedly acquired about a third of his margin of victory by purging more voters from strong-Dem precincts than he did from strong-GOP ones. There were other changes in voting procedures that year, which resulted in voters in heavily Black districts enduring very long lines to cast their votes. Democrats had brought various complaints suggesting that Kemp's manipulation of the rolls in his own upcoming election was a bit like the former binding precedent of Fox v. Henhouse, but amazingly, the more relevant test was Shelby County v. Holder, in which SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act because YAY! Year of Jubilee! Discrimination Against Negroes Is Over Ding Dong!
To be fair, Kemp is not a total flaming Republican asshole from Georgia; Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn't come along for two more years.He did stand up to the blatant efforts by FPT to "find" him enough votes to win, and when he first became Guv, he did sign a law to extend the deadline for the automatic purge of inactive voters, and added an extra notice requirement to let voters know they were being canceled. Meanwhile, his barely defeated opponent, Stacey Abrams, took advantage of her free time to start an organization called Fair Fight Georgia that decided to fight purge with surge. Her group worked within existing law to register thousands of new voters, educated them, and got them to the polls for primaries and the 2020 general election. The result was stunning: Joe Biden became the first Democrat to take Georgia since native son Jimmy Carter, and both US Senate races went to runoffs, which were eventually won by the Democratic challengers in early January.
This would not do.
Within days of their final defeats in January, Georgia Republicans, still (barely) in the Guv's chair and in (gerrymandered) control of both state houses, introduced legislation to stop these uppity voters from coming into the massa's house. Rules the Lej had just passed for 2020 with vast GOP support to make voting easier? Rolled back or eliminated. Early voting hours cut to barely beyond those of the working day. Sunday voting made county-optional, after first proposing to eliminate it altogether to combat "souls to the polls" drives that are a staple of historically Black churches but not of Evangelical whites who have to get home for the NFL at 1:00. Drop boxes limited in place and time. And as the most visible bitchslap, the final bill criminalized providing food or water to voters who were often, in long lines in (guess which color) precincts, stretched way beyond lengths of place and time than are typically found at the Mayberry Town Hall. Kemp signed this bill early last week, surrounded by a gaggle of white male legislators, and under a painting of a plantation. Only the white robes and hoods were missing. A Black legislator tried to crash the party and was promptly arrested and changed with a felony.
There's more, but that's among the abuses that quickly led to people sitting up and taking notice. Some of them with bats and balls.
----
The Milwaukee Braves moved to a brand new ballpark in Atlanta in 1966. They are now on their third stadium in those 55 years. (The Mets are also on their third in 60, but their first two years were in an ancient field built for polo and destined from Day One to be replaced by Shea, where they remained for 45 years). Atlanta's original multipurpose one, shared with the NFL Falcons, was too cookie-cutter, and they were blessed with the 1996 Olympics to bring a stadium suitable mainly for baseball out of the deal, named Turner Field after their then-owner Ted. It took fewer than 20 years for Braves fans to wear out that welcome; by the mid-teens, they were already planning to be on their way to the lilier-whiter suburbs of Cobb County, with dog-whistling about "crime downtown" (from none other than former Brave reliever and opponent of minority straphangers Jon Rocker) leading the charge out of Fulton County proper.
The Lords of Baseball have had to give up a bit of the gravy from the Brinks trains that crisscrossed America to build them new stadiums on the public dime in the 90s and oughts. Tax increases to finance new stadiums, even on visitors through hotel and rental car add-ons, have become Republican verboten; tax credits for these billionaires have been questioned and sometimes rolled back; and most teams are stable and/or locked-in enough to their current locations to limit the amount of stadium blackmail. By far the most deserving onfield franchise with the least in-stand support is Tampa Bay, and they are locked into an ancient deal prohibiting any negotiations with potential suitor cities (Montreal being the source of much speculation) until 2027. So to get their desired gimmes- newer and nicer buildings, inwhiter less crime-infested neighborhoods, whatever- MLB has a few things to offer in return. One of them is awarding the annual All-Star Game.
For most of my baseball life, the midsummer event was strictly rotated among the cities, AL and NL alternating years, but sometime around the 80s it became a carrot to be dangled, and expansion cities, along with older franchises showing off shiny new stadia, moved to the head of the queue. (One that's never hosted is the aforementioned Tampa, which plays in a horrid multipurpose dome in a separate Bay Area city.) Shea Stadium got the game in its first year open in 1964, but the Mets didn't host their second until 2013, five years after their new Field opened. Most of the newer parks from then and since have gotten the honor, and this year, it was to be the Braves' turn to show off their suburban Your Bank Name Here Ballpark, coincidentally building around the legacy of longtime local slugger Hank Aaron who died earlier this year.
At least, that was the plan until Brian Kemp and his Lej of Contempt passed their voter suppression bill. It took mere days for MLB to announce that it was moving the game out of Georgia on account of the backlash against the move. Immediately, the pearl-clutchers of right-wing media suddenly realized the consequences of the action, and responded, as they always do these days, by doubling down.
How dare they cancel-culture us!, they cried, followed instantly by
Cancel-culture baseball for cancel-culturing us!!!
You'd think this would not have come as a shock. Way back in the more tolerant early 90s, when Donald Trump was merely a local crook and grifter, Arizona voters rejected a proposal to adopt the federal MLK holiday on its own calendar, and the NFL responded by pulling the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix. (The Bills lost in LA that year; who knows if it would have gone better in the desert?) More recently, the NCAA responded to homophobic legislation in Indiana and North Carolina by threatening to move events and, in Indiana's case, its headquarters from the Hoosier State. Then-Guv Mike Pence signed a quick "correction" of the blatant homophobia in the former, and the Tarheels, noticing there is basketball orange in the rainbow flag, repealed its notorious "bathroom bill." Georgia, so far, is holding firm; my guess is that if they amend at all, it will be window dressing, like "allowing" food and drink to be given to voters but only stale Wonder Bread and cups of tap water, because Bernie Sanders wouldn't want sugary foods or litter from water bottles.
But my final observation about the debacle came only last night:
They didn't have to do this now. They could have formed a BS blue ribbon commission to investigate all the frauds from the 2020 election, then had a report come out sometime in mid-summer, maybe, I don't know, THE WEEK AFTER THE FUCKING GAME, and then still had time to ram it through before the 2021 elections. Even if they held off until a year from now, who'd care? They don't give a shit about this November's Gwinnett dog catcher race. It's the midterms and the statewide offices in 2022, and the already-underway 2024 Presidential race, that this is all about.
But they have no sense of strategy. They were in such a hurry to sick Trump's duck at the first opportunity, they literally gave the game away.
Play ball! Someplace else!
In 2018, a Black Democrat almost defeated a Republican for governor. Brian Kemp was not the GOP incumbent; he had something better for these purposes. In 2017, he was Georgia's Secretary of State, giving him power over state voter rolls, and with one keystroke of an ENTER, he exited over half a million voters from the rolls because they had not voted in enough prior contests. By at least one report, more than 100,000 of them would have otherwise have been eligible to have voted in the 2018 statewide races. Kemp also delayed processing of new registrations. In the end, he won by fewer than 55,000. You'll never guess which candidate was impacted more negatively by the purge. If you click that link, it'll show that Kemp singlehandedly acquired about a third of his margin of victory by purging more voters from strong-Dem precincts than he did from strong-GOP ones. There were other changes in voting procedures that year, which resulted in voters in heavily Black districts enduring very long lines to cast their votes. Democrats had brought various complaints suggesting that Kemp's manipulation of the rolls in his own upcoming election was a bit like the former binding precedent of Fox v. Henhouse, but amazingly, the more relevant test was Shelby County v. Holder, in which SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act because YAY! Year of Jubilee! Discrimination Against Negroes Is Over Ding Dong!
To be fair, Kemp is not a total flaming Republican asshole from Georgia; Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn't come along for two more years.He did stand up to the blatant efforts by FPT to "find" him enough votes to win, and when he first became Guv, he did sign a law to extend the deadline for the automatic purge of inactive voters, and added an extra notice requirement to let voters know they were being canceled. Meanwhile, his barely defeated opponent, Stacey Abrams, took advantage of her free time to start an organization called Fair Fight Georgia that decided to fight purge with surge. Her group worked within existing law to register thousands of new voters, educated them, and got them to the polls for primaries and the 2020 general election. The result was stunning: Joe Biden became the first Democrat to take Georgia since native son Jimmy Carter, and both US Senate races went to runoffs, which were eventually won by the Democratic challengers in early January.
This would not do.
Within days of their final defeats in January, Georgia Republicans, still (barely) in the Guv's chair and in (gerrymandered) control of both state houses, introduced legislation to stop these uppity voters from coming into the massa's house. Rules the Lej had just passed for 2020 with vast GOP support to make voting easier? Rolled back or eliminated. Early voting hours cut to barely beyond those of the working day. Sunday voting made county-optional, after first proposing to eliminate it altogether to combat "souls to the polls" drives that are a staple of historically Black churches but not of Evangelical whites who have to get home for the NFL at 1:00. Drop boxes limited in place and time. And as the most visible bitchslap, the final bill criminalized providing food or water to voters who were often, in long lines in (guess which color) precincts, stretched way beyond lengths of place and time than are typically found at the Mayberry Town Hall. Kemp signed this bill early last week, surrounded by a gaggle of white male legislators, and under a painting of a plantation. Only the white robes and hoods were missing. A Black legislator tried to crash the party and was promptly arrested and changed with a felony.
There's more, but that's among the abuses that quickly led to people sitting up and taking notice. Some of them with bats and balls.
----
The Milwaukee Braves moved to a brand new ballpark in Atlanta in 1966. They are now on their third stadium in those 55 years. (The Mets are also on their third in 60, but their first two years were in an ancient field built for polo and destined from Day One to be replaced by Shea, where they remained for 45 years). Atlanta's original multipurpose one, shared with the NFL Falcons, was too cookie-cutter, and they were blessed with the 1996 Olympics to bring a stadium suitable mainly for baseball out of the deal, named Turner Field after their then-owner Ted. It took fewer than 20 years for Braves fans to wear out that welcome; by the mid-teens, they were already planning to be on their way to the lilier-whiter suburbs of Cobb County, with dog-whistling about "crime downtown" (from none other than former Brave reliever and opponent of minority straphangers Jon Rocker) leading the charge out of Fulton County proper.
The Lords of Baseball have had to give up a bit of the gravy from the Brinks trains that crisscrossed America to build them new stadiums on the public dime in the 90s and oughts. Tax increases to finance new stadiums, even on visitors through hotel and rental car add-ons, have become Republican verboten; tax credits for these billionaires have been questioned and sometimes rolled back; and most teams are stable and/or locked-in enough to their current locations to limit the amount of stadium blackmail. By far the most deserving onfield franchise with the least in-stand support is Tampa Bay, and they are locked into an ancient deal prohibiting any negotiations with potential suitor cities (Montreal being the source of much speculation) until 2027. So to get their desired gimmes- newer and nicer buildings, in
For most of my baseball life, the midsummer event was strictly rotated among the cities, AL and NL alternating years, but sometime around the 80s it became a carrot to be dangled, and expansion cities, along with older franchises showing off shiny new stadia, moved to the head of the queue. (One that's never hosted is the aforementioned Tampa, which plays in a horrid multipurpose dome in a separate Bay Area city.) Shea Stadium got the game in its first year open in 1964, but the Mets didn't host their second until 2013, five years after their new Field opened. Most of the newer parks from then and since have gotten the honor, and this year, it was to be the Braves' turn to show off their suburban Your Bank Name Here Ballpark, coincidentally building around the legacy of longtime local slugger Hank Aaron who died earlier this year.
At least, that was the plan until Brian Kemp and his Lej of Contempt passed their voter suppression bill. It took mere days for MLB to announce that it was moving the game out of Georgia on account of the backlash against the move. Immediately, the pearl-clutchers of right-wing media suddenly realized the consequences of the action, and responded, as they always do these days, by doubling down.
How dare they cancel-culture us!, they cried, followed instantly by
Cancel-culture baseball for cancel-culturing us!!!
You'd think this would not have come as a shock. Way back in the more tolerant early 90s, when Donald Trump was merely a local crook and grifter, Arizona voters rejected a proposal to adopt the federal MLK holiday on its own calendar, and the NFL responded by pulling the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix. (The Bills lost in LA that year; who knows if it would have gone better in the desert?) More recently, the NCAA responded to homophobic legislation in Indiana and North Carolina by threatening to move events and, in Indiana's case, its headquarters from the Hoosier State. Then-Guv Mike Pence signed a quick "correction" of the blatant homophobia in the former, and the Tarheels, noticing there is basketball orange in the rainbow flag, repealed its notorious "bathroom bill." Georgia, so far, is holding firm; my guess is that if they amend at all, it will be window dressing, like "allowing" food and drink to be given to voters but only stale Wonder Bread and cups of tap water, because Bernie Sanders wouldn't want sugary foods or litter from water bottles.
But my final observation about the debacle came only last night:
They didn't have to do this now. They could have formed a BS blue ribbon commission to investigate all the frauds from the 2020 election, then had a report come out sometime in mid-summer, maybe, I don't know, THE WEEK AFTER THE FUCKING GAME, and then still had time to ram it through before the 2021 elections. Even if they held off until a year from now, who'd care? They don't give a shit about this November's Gwinnett dog catcher race. It's the midterms and the statewide offices in 2022, and the already-underway 2024 Presidential race, that this is all about.
But they have no sense of strategy. They were in such a hurry to sick Trump's duck at the first opportunity, they literally gave the game away.
Play ball! Someplace else!