Trump Goes All In On Rigging The System To Advance White Rural Political Power | Talking Points Memo

There are not enough people who have directly experienced totalitarianism in this nation. We are, in a sense, a victim of our success.

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It’s important to realize that this move is also meant to ignore immigrants who are here legally…it’s portraying immigrants as just unauthorized ones, but by focusing only on citizens it ignores the legal immigrants, many of whom are green card holders who have lived here for decades. There are 13 million green card holders, and millions more who legally live here for years on various visas…each of those immigrants impacts the communities they are in, and they need support from the federal government for some of those impacts. It’s not even getting into the undocumented immigrants, the intent of this is to remove power from immigrant communities and their American citizens, which is the entire point of a program meant to disempower non-white communities.

This just should not stand, it’s an unfair policy that hurts American citizens based on politics, and is meant to keep the party that depends on the white vote, and white supremacist leanings, to stay in power. If this is still a just society this will go nowhere…hopefully Trump loses and this is made moot by Biden. This does raise the stakes in the election though, if Trump wins there’s no doubt that they will attempt to push everyone who is not white out of political power, and out of the nation if they can.

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They would need to impute the number. The sampling and math that would go into any formula obviously would be biased.

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Have you been watching the news the past two months? Everyone in the streets ain’t exactly singing Trump’s praises.

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Those rural white people need to be reminded that they are not isolated from their choices. Next President should cut of farm support payments just to have them reconsider their unbwavering loyalty to the GOP.

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That depends which streets are you walking on.

I’ll take the numbers in our streets compared to what he has showing up in his streets.

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“Those rural white people need to be reminded that they are not isolated from their choices”

Covid 19 is hitting them upside the head reminding them.

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Yea but his cronies are the ones doing the counting…

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So he’s planning to go on his best guestimate? At this point I suspect numbers pulled out of thin air.

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My comment wasn’t about the census count, but the comment above about people sitting on their hands while DJT wages war against the population. That’s patently not true right now, just because we don’t want to be the first ones firing a gun in this battle doesn’t mean the people haven’t stepped up already to fight back.

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Look, I’m a crusty, cynical old guy. I get that it looks bad and feels bad out there but I’m pretty sure we aren’t there yet. Hope for the best, but don’t get caught off guard is my thing right now.

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“Just as we do not give political power to people who are here temporarily, we should not give political power to people who should not be here at all,” his statement said.

Unless it’s the cash of certain foreigners - that political power is welcome!

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Yup. Sent a week in East Berlin before reunification. Many folks we talked to were meeting Americans face to face for the first time, and embraced us - quite literally - for giving them hope and - finally - freedom from the soviet controlled East. To hear their stories, and that they held onto hope because of armed forces radio (where they learned the forbidden language English) is a lifetime memory and lesson. Can only imagine what those folks think now. Yet, sadly, too many Americans won’t be bothered to vote this November, and too many others will vote against their own best interests.

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I posted this on another thread—this is why Trump has already failed in this attempt.

In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified in its April 4 Evenwel v. Abbott ruling that legislative districts should be drawn inclusive of all the people living within them, as has been the standard for at least the past five decades. Texas resident Sue Evenwel challenged that standard with the help of Voting Rights Act-foe Ed Blum, the director of the Project on Fair Representation, charging that districts should be drawn based on eligible voters, not total population. This would effectively exclude the interests of children, immigrants, the incarcerated, and many Latinos and African Americans who’ve been disenfranchised. It would also shift considerable political advantage to older, rural, white voters, who tend to vote Republican.

SCOTUS rejected Evenwel’s challenge by a unanimous vote. Wrote Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates—children, their parents, even their grandparents, for example, have a stake in a strong public-education system—and in receiving constituent services, such as help navigating public-benefits bureaucracies. By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation.

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Texas tried a similar maneuver last year with the voting rolls. It went about as well as you’d expect.

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How?

I mean this as a serious question, because the US Bureau of the Census seems to be running a pretty transparent operation. People with addresses received mail encouraging them to respond online. I get an email every few days reporting the percentage of replies received. Last fall I received many emails wanting to recruit me to a job with them for the 2020 census.

As I always reminded my students - anyone who buys anything is charged a tax. If you own property (including a car), you are charged a tax. If you receive a paycheck from an employer, taxes have been withheld.

Representation is deserved by all.

Easiest example: If you have a child in a public school, you deserve a voice (a vote) for the school board(s) that set policy and in some cases even choose the textbooks, and county and state representatives, who allocate the funds for schools.

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The in-person activities the Census Bureau conducts to complete its count have been hobbled, and the resulting undercount is most likely to affect communities of color and lower-income people,

What have “my African-Americans” and “the Blacks” got to lose? Precisely this, you evil motherf***er!

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The comments here are the typical TPM readers’ comments: Informed, literate, thoughtful. Most of this means squat to a huge portion of the electorate.

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