June 22, 2017
The question is,”What are you willing to sacrifice?” Although the results are barely 24 hours old in the Georgia 6th, the recriminations have already begun. Are you willing to stop treating politics like a bonus season of “House of Cards” and ignore the pundits who assert that our problem was that Ossoff was too progressive, or those who assert that he was not progressive enough? Can you tune out those who claim that the Democrats’ defeat is proof that we have no chance of taking Congress in 2018 and who suggest that we get rid of Nancy Pelosi, simply because Republicans can effectively invoke her in their attack ads? We can’t afford to get scorched by the hot takes.
The truth is that even though we came tantalizingly close and were awash in money, the Georgia 6th was always a heavy lift. Tom Price won 60% of the vote in November of 2016. Knocking Handel down to 53% was an accomplishment. The truth is that there are 80 districts that are more genuinely competitive than the Georgia 6th and we only need to win 24 of them to take Congress. This race was not a bellwether for 2018 and we should be very wary of defeatist rhetoric that over-interprets it as such. The goal of such talk is to demoralize progressives. We need to recognize that defeatism is self-indulgent. We are in the fight of our lives and those in power are not constrained by law, ethics or honesty.
If you doubt that, consider the following:
1. In 2016 the Russians hacked the software of a major vendor of voting software, breached the security of twenty one state election officials and obtained thousands of Democratic voter files. They then communicated with Republican operatives to alert them to the existence of the information. We have no way of knowing how many Republicans availed themselves of this “fruit of the poisonous tree,” but we know that the Trump administration has taken no steps to secure our voting systems going forward and that no Republicans in Congress have demanded it.
2. Republican led states continue to enact harsh voter i.d. laws, despite the fact that federal courts repeatedly find that these laws are designed to disenfranchise Black and Latino voters. Republican Secretaries of State also deploy technological voter suppression tools like Crosscheck software to purge their rolls of Black, Latino and Asian voters. Crosscheck compares state voter rolls and if the same name appears in two different states, one or both of the voters may be removed from the rolls. No effort is made to determine if the two names are the same person by looking at birthdates or middle names. Journalist Greg Palast estimates that thousands of African American and Latino voters were disenfranchised in Republican led states in the 2016 election.
3. Today Senate Republicans unveiled a healthcare bill which would literally kill your grandmother to give a tax cut to the wealthy (h/t @samswey). They know that people who are too sick or too poor can’t organize. Republicans also know that people of color will suffer disproportionately under this bill.
Republicans have shown us, in ways large and small, that they are hostile to the very concept of an inclusive democracy which works for the good of all Americans. If we are going to have any chance of defeating them, we will have to be relentless. 53 years ago today, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi for trying to help Black people win the right to vote. So I ask you again, “What are you willing to sacrifice?”
#Georgia6th; #AHCA