Knocking on a door?
Arrested?
Eight Years?
Ok….
She isn’t gonna do anytime….
Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon on Thursday night recounted her arrest last weekprotesting Georgia’s controversial election overhaul bill as “terrifying” and said she was “afraid” in the moment, but that she felt it was important to try and witness the bill’s signing for transparency reasons…
…
The Democratic lawmaker was arrested and removed from the Georgia Capitol last Thursday after she repeatedly knocked on the door to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s office during his signing of the elections bill, SB 202. Republicans rushed the bill through both chambers of the legislature within a few hours before Kemp signed it into law that night.
Asked about the video of her arrest, Cannon told CNN, “It makes me wonder, why? Why were they arresting me? Why were they doing this? Why did the world have to experience another traumatic arrest?”….
…
The affidavit states that Cannon was charged with disrupting General Assembly session because she “knowingly and intentionally did by knocking the governor’s door during session of singing [sic] a bill.”
The arrest affidavit for the felony obstruction charge says Cannon “did knowingly and willfully hinder Officer E. Dorval and Officer G. Sanchez of the Capitol PD, a law enforcement officer in the lawful discharge or the officer’s official duties by Use of Threats of Violence, violence to the person of said officer by stomping on LT Langford foot three times during the apprehension and as she was being escorted out of the property. The accused continued on kicking LT Langford with her heels.”…
image…Georgia state Rep. Park Cannon is placed in handcuffs by state troopers on March 25 after being asked to stop knocking on a door to Gov. Brian Kemp’s office. (Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)
In all three talk about election “reform” this gets too little mention.
Silver hits it on the head!
“Changes to state laws that would make it easier for partisan actors to invalidate election results are a greater existential threat to democracy ,by an order of magnitude,than the sorts of changes to voting procedures that states are contemplating.”
Nate Silver
… or as the old anticommunist saw went:
“In your country, the voters choose the government,
But in ours exactly the opposite is true!!”
Yup DSD….
Ga Sec of State Brad Raffensperger (R-Enemies List) defends Georgia’s voting law in National Review:
Setting the Record Straight on Georgia’s New Voter-Access Law
By BRAD RAFFENSPERGER
April 6, 2021 12:46 PM
Ignore the partisan disinformation. Georgia remains a national leader in voting access and election security.
What is most incredible about what has happened over the past week in Georgia is the speed with which liberal politicians and their allies went from condemning election disinformation to wholeheartedly spreading it. If we were not so used to the hypocrisy, it might have given us whiplash.
Case in point is Georgia senator Raphael Warnock. In a fundraising email sent soon after SB 202 — Georgia’s new voter-access law — was passed, he falsely accused Georgia Republicans of waging “a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights” by “ending no-excuse mail voting” and “restricting early voting on weekends.” I realize that Senator Warnock is a new lawmaker, but he should at least read the bill in question before tossing out completely false claims. SB 202 leaves no-excuse absentee voting in place and expands early voting in Georgia by mandating an additional day of weekend voting in all Georgia counties. It also continues Sunday voting in counties that want it.
Not to be outdone, President Biden alleged that SB 202’s new photo-ID-number requirement for absentee ballots “will effectively deny the right to vote to countless voters.” He should tell that to the majority of Georgia voters, Georgia Democrats, and black voters in Georgia who supported the commonsense effort. Studies show that voter-ID laws don’t decrease turnout. Georgia’s voter-turnout numbers and percentages have hit records repeatedly since we introduced photo ID for in-person voting.
In his statement, Biden also alleged that the new law “ends voting hours early.” Even the left-leaning Washington Post agreed that wasn’t true, giving the claim four Pinocchios and saying “there’s no evidence that is the case.”
The reality is that Georgia remains a national leader in access to the polls.
NOW WATCH: ‘House Democrats Try to Steal an Election in Iowa’
Georgia has the most successful automatic voter-registration program in the country. Automatically registering eligible voters through the Georgia Department of Driver Services, which confirms citizenship prior to registration, makes it easier for eligible voters to vote, and ensures that election officials have accurate, up-to-date information. Notably, President Biden’s home state of Delaware does not offer this to voters.
Stacey Abrams is pushing for just 15 days of early voting, below the 16 days Georgia has offered its voters for years. SB 202 has built on that, requiring 17 days of early voting at minimum, including two Saturdays. By contrast, Abrams recently praised New Jersey for having nine days of early voting. If more access is better, how is nine days praiseworthy but 17 suppressive? Ditto for President Biden. His home state of Delaware doesn’t offer any early voting. And though Georgia voters can request an absentee ballot without explanation, President Biden’s home state of Delaware still requires an excuse.
President Biden, Senator Warnock, and the other critics of Georgia’s new law care more about whipping up outrage among their base than talking about actual policy. If they looked at the facts, they’d discover that SB 202 makes some commonsense adjustments following an election stressed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The legislation moves Georgia from the subjective signature-match identity-verification process for absentee-ballot voting to objective ID numbers from photo IDs, free voter IDs, or other documents. I introduced this concept last year with the absentee-ballot-request portal, and it won bipartisan praise. With such close elections, moving to an objective standard takes pressure off of our local election officials.
It is also convenient for voters. Over 97 percent of Georgia’s voters have a driver’s-license number associated with their voter-registration record….
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/setting-the-record-straight-on-georgias-new-voter-access-law/
Bold face text (below the headline) entirely unintentional. Maybe James can fix it.
And then National Review cancels out the arguable (or at least plausible) case of a principled Republican with this argument against a universal franchise straight out of the 18th and 19th century North or the South before 1970. (Rhode Island didn’t completely end its property requirement for the franchise until about 1900. Williamson would have been on the Landholders’ side in the Dorr Wars.)
Of course, Williamson is just explicitly expressing the old anti-democratic arguments that many conservatives have always felt and are now acting upon so vigorously. This eerily echoes the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s rueful comment about the East German dictatorship’s reaction to the uprising of 1953:
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Why Not Fewer Voters?
By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
April 6, 2021 7:38 PM
The fact is that voters got us into this mess. Maybe more voters aren’t the The fact is that voters got us into this mess. Maybe the answer isn’t more voters..
Much of the discussion about proposed changes to voting laws backed by many Republicans and generally opposed by Democrats begs the question and simply asserts that having more people vote is, ceteris paribus, a good thing.
Why should we believe that?
Why shouldn’t we believe the opposite? That the republic would be better served by having fewer — but better — voters?
Many Americans, being devout egalitarians, recoil from the very notion of better voters as a matter of rhetoric, even as they accept qualifications as a matter of fact.
Categorically disenfranchising felons has always been, in my view, the intelligent default position, with re-enfranchisement on a case-by-case basis. It is likely that under such a practice some people who ought to be considered rehabilitated would be unjustly excluded. But all eligibility requirements risk excluding somebody who might make a good voter, or a better voter than someone who is eligible. There are plenty of very smart and responsible 16-year-olds who would make better voters than their dim and irresponsible older siblings or their parents. That doesn’t mean we should have 16-year-old voters — I’d be more inclined to raise the voting age to 30 — it means only that categorical decision-making by its nature does not account for certain individual differences.
Similarly, asking for government-issued photo ID at the polls seem to me obviously the right thing to do, even if it would result in some otherwise eligible voters not voting. I’m not convinced that having more voters is a good thing in any case, but, even if I were, that would not be the only good, but only one good competing with other goods, one of which is seeing to it that the eligibility rules on the books are enforced so that elections may be honestly and credibly regulated.
We could verify eligibility at the polls rigorously and easily, if we wanted to, just as we have the ability to verify who is eligible to enter the country or to drive a car. Of course that would put some burdens on voters. So, what? We expect people, including poor and struggling people, to pay their taxes — why shouldn’t we also expect them to keep their drivers’ licenses up-to-date? If voting really is the sacred duty that we’re always being told it is, shouldn’t we treat it at least as seriously as filing a 1040EZ?
There would be more voters if we made it easier to vote, and there would be more doctors if we didn’t require a license to practice medicine. The fact that we believe unqualified doctors to be a public menace but act as though unqualified voters were just stars in the splendid constellation of democracy indicates how little real esteem we actually have for the vote, in spite of our public pieties….
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/why-not-fewer-voters/