My unusually long silence may have had readers wondering if I had decided to hang it up after the Biden inauguration. Rest assured, the embers of moderation continued to smoulder in my middle-of-the-road belly even as I took a few weeks off to attend to a family situation. There was, of course, no dearth of issues to fan said embers in the interim.
For today's post I have chosen the issue that inspired me to start this blog in the first place. I am referring to elections in our country and the many ways they are manipulated to skew the outcome. A reader of this blog on the right of the political spectrum may wonder why, if I am indeed in the middle of the road, I am far more critical of Republicans than of Democrats. As I have said in an earlier post this is likely because Republicans have strayed so far to the right that it is impossible to find common ground with them. An example of this phenomenon are the election laws being considered and passed in states under Republican control. It is as if they have decided that if their voter base has shrunk to the point where the advantage provided by partisan gerrymandering and the Electoral College is vanishing, they will simply move the goalposts where and while they can to try to disenfranchise voters who they feel vote for Democrats. I can only shake my head in disbelief at the specious arguments being put forward in support of these laws. True, gerrymandering has historically been practised by both parties. But Republican resistance to efforts to remove partisanship from the process of districting betrays a fear of the consequences of such change. In fact, the recently enacted law in Georgia seeks to cement the control of the State government over local election officials. One wonders if conservatives on the Supreme Court who gutted the Civil Rights Laws of the 1960s on the ground that they were no longer necessary (after all Barack Obama did get elected - twice) would back local city and county officials' authority to run elections at the local level over that of the state. How naive of me to even ask the question! One can only hope that such tactics will keep enough voters mad enough to turn out to vote in numbers that dwarf the 2020 turnout. In this scenario the ability of the middle-of-the-road voter to influence the outcome cannot be over-stated.