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What Hillary Clinton's Campaign Is Getting Right
Perhaps it's been overlooked by the inside baseball press corps but, so far, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has hit all the right buttons about what's really going on in the country. Specifically, the rigging of our politics to suit the needs of the money power, the slide toward oligarchy that has not been arrested for any length of time since Ronald Reagan started the snowball down the mountain with his first budget in 1981. She has come out in favor of a constitutional amendment to reverse the Citizens United decision and its progeny–a longshot proposition at best, but the only real solution at law to the legalized influence-peddling that the decision produced. (Read the decision again. It's damned near bulletproof.) And, Thursday, in a speech she's planning to take on the second arm of the pincer attack on popular democracy–John Roberts's declaration of the Day Of Jubilee.
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Make no mistake. This is a fight worth making and a debate worth having. The Republican party considers its efforts to restrict the franchise an unalloyed triumph. It helped get Greg Abbott elected governor of Texas. Scott Walker never shuts up about the grotesque law that he and his pet legislature enacted in Wisconsin, the state that gave us so many of the mechanisms by which the money power first was struck from our elections. And, in where-the-fck else, Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback may allow his secretary of state, Kris Kobach, the man behind the Papers, Please theory of immigration law, to prosecute "voter fraud" cases that state prosecutors had declared non-starters. Voter suppression is a litmus test on the political Right now, and it is a central pillar of Republican politics general, and it has been ever since Karl Rove used it as the casus belli in his purge of U.S. Attorneys nine years ago. It is a long game they've been playing.
As hard as it may be for the likes of Chris Cillizza to understand, there is considerable merit in taking on important issues that do not necessarily poll as well as "Eeek! Moosssslims!" does. The corruption of our politics by the money power, and the new mechanisms enacted to safeguard it, is the fundamental issue of our time because, unless it is reversed, and soon, all of the other issues won't matter because no real solutions will emerge from the one place where they are supposed to emerge. Ms. Rodham Clinton seems to get this. Good on her for bringing it up.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35474/hillary-clinton-voting-rights-act/
...
Make no mistake. This is a fight worth making and a debate worth having. The Republican party considers its efforts to restrict the franchise an unalloyed triumph. It helped get Greg Abbott elected governor of Texas. Scott Walker never shuts up about the grotesque law that he and his pet legislature enacted in Wisconsin, the state that gave us so many of the mechanisms by which the money power first was struck from our elections. And, in where-the-fck else, Kansas, Governor Sam Brownback may allow his secretary of state, Kris Kobach, the man behind the Papers, Please theory of immigration law, to prosecute "voter fraud" cases that state prosecutors had declared non-starters. Voter suppression is a litmus test on the political Right now, and it is a central pillar of Republican politics general, and it has been ever since Karl Rove used it as the casus belli in his purge of U.S. Attorneys nine years ago. It is a long game they've been playing.
As hard as it may be for the likes of Chris Cillizza to understand, there is considerable merit in taking on important issues that do not necessarily poll as well as "Eeek! Moosssslims!" does. The corruption of our politics by the money power, and the new mechanisms enacted to safeguard it, is the fundamental issue of our time because, unless it is reversed, and soon, all of the other issues won't matter because no real solutions will emerge from the one place where they are supposed to emerge. Ms. Rodham Clinton seems to get this. Good on her for bringing it up.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35474/hillary-clinton-voting-rights-act/
