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Without looking at the transcript, I would assume that the context of the discussion at the Supreme Court was standing. At best his point only lays bare the intrinsic unseemliness of quasi-institutionalized party politics. I could easily see Democrats make the same point in other cases, and I'm sure they have. The Chairman of the Arizona's Gov't and Elections Committee is simply expressing what has been a common conservative sentiment for ages--that voting is a responsibility, not just a privilege, and one that shouldn't be exercised lightly. Rand Paul, at least if we're being charitable, is making the same argument. None of those sentiments are inherently discriminatory, neither conceptually nor in practice, which is fundamentally what matters. The belief that the government should actively "Get Out the Vote" is a policy preference, not a constitutional imperative--at least not in the U.S., which lacks mandatory voting laws. "Get Out the Vote" is just a pithy statement of one's preferred policy. Though, without rigorous oversight it's quite easy--almost trivial, even--to apply those sentiments in a discriminatory manner. AFAIU, Thomas Hofeller, the infamous Republican strategist and redistricting consultant whose personal papers were revealed by his daughter after his death, approached voter ID laws this way--drafting them in ways that were inherently, knowingly, deliberately discriminatory, supported by reams of empirical data, though I'm not sure if racially or otherwise illegally discriminatory on their face. Some of his gerrymandering proposals, by contrast, were explicitly racially discriminatory. ("Hofeller's hard drive also retained a map of North Carolina’s 2017 state judicial gerrymander, with an overlay of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that these maps—which are currently at the center of a protracted legal battle—might also be a racial gerrymander.", https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-files-of...) |