What is being asked is NOT reasonable for anyone. remove race and economic status from the equation here and boil it down to its core.
We want people to vote. We want to know that they are who they say they are…which is really just ensuring they are eligible to vote. The Driver’s license is not a false equivalency at all. There are conditions where someone is not allowed/eligible to vote, just as there are conditions people are not allowed to drive. The difference between these is that voting is a right, and driving is a privilege. So why do we have a clear process to guide the privilege? The right is far more important.
We agree on the same principle that is voter rights are important and the process should be simple for all people to take part in the process. We also do want to have a process, not zero process; but again it needs to be fair and simple for all people.
Also from that Hollywood Reporter piece, something that was initially surprising, but makes sense given his ability to tease out the cray-cray in America:
Oliver had not even been to America before he was summoned in 2006 for a Daily Show audition, apparently on the recommendation of Ricky Gervais, a fellow Brit who was familiar with Oliver's career in the U.K.
Historically, “voter ID” laws will be seen to be the New Jim Crow.
Let’s just hope all the cynical Republican politicians who push for this will be equally memorialized in those history books. Because right now they lead blameless lives.
Case in point: the U.S. Postal Service. Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, requiring the USPS to fully fund pensions, including for future potential employees (including those not yet born), 75 years in advance. They were trying to run the post office out of business so that for-profit companies could take over. Amazingly, the USPS has actually managed to not buckle under…yet. Technically, the required pre-funding has a 10-year window, so the extra set-asides stop in 2017. That’s only a year from now, which means there is a very vocal push to declare the USPS dead in the water NOW – as an example of an incompetent government agency – so as to effect the need for privatization before they have the chance to get back to business as usual (which would mean they’d have a surplus every year).
I am always pleasantly surprised that I need no id to vote in my state. They are always pleased I showed up and as it’s always a few days after Halloween, I bring the workers candy.
“My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
– Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading right-wing strategist
IOW, yes, one right-wing strategy is to make government services so inefficient that they shut down, in part because that enforced inefficiency drives people to privatized alternatives.
one reflects on purely subjective truths and personal measuring sticks. One surely is not reflecting on every metric which may matter to other stakeholders, when one thinks.
But I hear ya, that ol gov’t inefficiently. Never has an old saw had a sweeter tune than in a discussion of disenfranchisement.
I think making government smaller is way different than making is incompetent and less efficient. Though I concede in some cases one may affect the other.
How long has this been going on, because I don’t recall a time when the government was known for working well. When did this sabotage begin? How far does it reach?
I mean my ex-wife works for the feds and she has lots of fun stories. She actually cares about doing a good job, but you can literally be a sexual predator and it will take you years to get fired - including one year off with paid leave why they figure it out. And this is for a branch that actually has important over sight - which again, takes months to years to effectively do anything. It’s like going to work in a 40 year old Yugo that is leaking carbon monoxide into the cabin. Yeah, it is all you have and the best you can do right now, but it still sucks.
