Wisconsin: Dale Schultz, Stephanie Miller and the forgotten GOP support for voting rights
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/dale-schultz-stephanie-miller-and-the-forgotten-gop-support-for/article_02642ebe-e15b-5358-abee-46f9948531a0.html
When state Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, denounced his fellow Republicans for cutting the number of hours when Wisconsinites can vote, the attention was on his declaration that “I am not willing to defend them anymore."
And his explanation that GOP efforts to make voting more difficult are "all predicated on some belief there is a massive fraud or irregularities, something my colleagues have been hot on the trail for three years and have failed miserably at demonstrating."
And his observation that “it’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. We should be pitching as political parties our ideas for improving things in the future rather than mucking around in the mechanics and making it more confrontational at the voting sites and trying to suppress the vote.”
...
The "party of Lincoln" was not just on the right side of history in the mid-19th century, when it became a political vehicle of the abolitionist movement and of the Radical Republican struggle for reconstruction. A century later, the Grand Old Party was still in the forefront of the struggle, as Schultz noted when he spoke of embracing "the spirit of the champion of the 1957 voting rights act." Recalling the vital democratic work of "encouraging voting" and "making voting easier," Schultz said, "Back in 1957 with the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower, Republicans were doing that."
