Here's An Easy Question for You, Alison: Who Should Vote?

Should be an easy question, given that you are the sitting, elected Secretary of State of Kentucky and the person who literally decides who gets to vote and when and how. Should be even easier given that you are challenging sitting U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell for re-election, and the more people who vote the more likely you are to beat him. So ... what do you think?

I say everybody should vote: every repug, every freakazoid, every moron, every convicted criminal, every teabagger, every racist motherfucker out there.

Let's find out once and for all if they really are the majority, if they've really got more votes than all the fags and the sluts and the nii**ers and the messicans and the muslins and the commies and all the other demonrat-voting moochers.

But it won't ever happen. Because the repugs know damn good and well they haven't got the numbers to fill Rupp Arena for the 2014 Season Memorial Ceremony, much less the numbers to win dog catcher in tiny Robertson County, population, two thousand one hundred and eight-eight.

Steve M.

You and I may think that the Roberts Court's decision in the McCutcheon case to give obscenely rich people yet another way to buy elections is an affront to American values. But if you're a right-winger, it's a necessary bulwark against the biggest inherent risk of democracy: the possibility that citizens will actually vote.

You have to understand that that prospect terrifies the right. Right-wingers think that voters inevitably vote to give themselves the right to be more and more parasitical, until the moment arrives when society itself is unsustainable.

SNIP

If you believe this -- if you believe that the benefit-receiving, hammock-dwelling rabble just vote to take and take and take, heedless of the imminent collapse of civilization that they're bringing about, then of course you want as much money as possible in the electoral system -- it's a counterweight to the sans-culotte barbarians at the gate. Minimizing the impact of universal suffrage is vitally necessary in order to prevent the have-nots from draining the life out of the nation. One way of doing this, of course, is by limiting the franchise. The Nation's Ari Berman is one of many people to see a connection between two impulses of this Court:

The Supreme Court's Ideology: More Money, Less Voting

In the past four years, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has made it far easier to buy an election and far harder to vote in one.

First came the Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which brought us the Super PAC era.

Then came the Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act.

Now we have McCutcheon v. FEC, where the Court, in yet another controversial 5-4 opinion written by Roberts, struck down the limits on how much an individual can contribute to candidates, parties and political action committees. So instead of an individual donor being allowed to give $117,000 to campaigns, parties and PACs in an election cycle (the aggregate limit in 2012), they can now give up to $3.5 million....

Elected Republicans limit the franchise as well, of course, via voter ID laws and voter-roll purges.

This is what you do if you think democracy, left unchecked, will ultimately kill America. And that is what the right believes.

I'm a believer in pure Democracy: everybody votes, and the group with the most votes wins, and gets the prize.

Even if the group I think will destroy the world gets the most votes, I figure they'll get voted out as soon as things get bad, and a better group gets a chance to do its thing.

Because repugs and I share a dirty little secret: when everybody votes, repugs lose.

How about you, Alison? You want everybody to vote? Or you want the group with the most money to win?