These are interesting times indeed for the Democratic Party, especially in Missouri, where a Voter ID bill passed the Republican-dominated State Assembly right at the session’s deadline. Despite the Republican Party line about fighting nonexistent fraud, everybody knows this bill was crafted to keep a critical number of marginal voters from casting their votes in November. The sorts of people who do not carry a photo ID tend to be opposed to GOP policies and to vote Democrat, when they vote at all.
The Republicans have the numbers in Jefferson City, and some say the Democrats slumbered. No one wants to finger a person who is ill, but it was whispered in the Capitol this week that Secretary of State Robin Carnahan took a wait-and-see attitude toward the bill last fall, before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Some say more leadership from her office could have slowed or stopped the bill and kept it from going into effect before November. It now threatens to bite into votes for Democratic challengers like state Auditor Claire McCaskill, who looks bound to be eating Senator Jim Talent’s lunch next fall, should all eligible voters in this state actually be allowed to vote in November.
Other Democrats looked sideways and wondered if all of their colleagues did all they could to beat this bill. They wondered who needed a job and whether that person or people might be angling for a job from someone across the aisle. Y’all know who you are.
The self-hating and finger-pointing needed to have ended yesterday, if the Democrats want to capitalize on the weakest public confidence in Republican legislators in recent memory. The bill needs to be successfully challenged in the courts – similar bills have been contested in other states. While the Dems are still devising a strategy, the national office of the AARP is studying the final copy of the bill as you read this. The Missouri office of AARP says there’s “a good chance” the association would file suit on behalf of its more elderly constituents.
Whatever goes down in the courts, the Democratic Party had better begin a photo ID drive in Missouri – now – that rivals the old voter registration drives in the Deep South.
It just might be Candid Camera time in poor neighborhoods.