Lisa’s Latest Leftist Bootlick
Recently, NBC News rose to the defense of Lisa Murkowski, one of its favorite Republican senators. According to NBC News, Murkowski took a principled stand when she explained:
“When Democrats attempted to advance sweeping election reform legislation in 2021, Republicans were unanimous in opposition because it would have federalized elections, something we have long opposed,” Murkowski said in a statement. “Now, I’m seeing proposals such as the SAVE Act and MEGA that would effectively do just that. Once again, I do not support these efforts.”
Murkowski’s complaint about federalizing elections seems to have come about 160 years too late. Please check the Reconstruction Amendments, especially the 15th Amendment, which prohibits any attempt to abridge the voting rights of an American citizen based on a previous condition of servitude. The 19th Amendment, introduced in August 1920, further federalized elections by banning states from denying citizens the franchise because of sex. By then, states were already giving women the vote, but having the federal government impose that change on the states that were not further weakened their control of elections.
Then please look at the 24th Amendment prohibiting Congress or the states from requiring a poll tax to vote. That amendment, which further federalized elections, was passed in January 1964, during the tumultuous civil rights era. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 further weakened any effective state control of elections. It placed entire districts of the country, and not only in the South, under special federal supervision to make sure that black voting there was proportionate to the number of blacks in the district. Areas thus designated required “preclearance” from the attorney general or a federal court to allow any significant electoral changes. This form of federal control lasted well into the 21st century, when Congress ceased to renew the selection of certain areas for intensive supervision, although parts of the Voting Rights Act remain in force. Christopher Caldwell in The Age of Entitlement wrote that this act imposed a “second constitution” on the U.S. in place of our original one. Whether that act had that effect, it certainly represented a giant step forward toward federalizing our elections.
Murkowski must know, as a sitting senator, that the Democrats have been trying to pass their own federal voting law, which they will undoubtedly do if they can take back the Senate and if the executive doesn’t stop them. This would prohibit any requirement for voter identification nationwide. In California, poll officials are in fact forbidden from even asking for voter identification.
Such bizarre laws are intended to remove any possible barrier to Democratic election fraud. Since Murkowski opposes congressional attempts to guarantee honest elections, we might ask what she plans to do when the Democrats proceed to federalize national elections to facilitate their party’s opportunity to cheat. Please note that it’s Republican senators who are working to prevent this from happening by requiring minimal safeguards against voting fraud. Democrats doggedly oppose any law intended to limit voting to citizens because they think noncitizens and other unauthorized voters will support their candidates.
Murkowski’s suspicious concern about preventing the federalization of elections long after this has become, for better or worse, a fact of life, makes me wonder if that’s her real interest. Together with Susan Collins of Maine, she is the Republican senator who most often breaks with her party and votes with Democrats. She famously voted against Donald Trump when Congress impeached him and enthusiastically supported Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Unlike Collins, however, Murkowski does not represent a blue state, but a predictably Republican one. She has withstood serious challenges, most recently from the Trump-endorsed candidate Kelly Tshibaka in 2022. In that race, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s super PAC poured millions into getting Murkowski reelected.
An obvious asset that helped Murkowski reach the Senate in 2002 was that Lisa’s father, Frank Murkowski, had been a popular U.S. senator, who then became Alaska’s governor the year his daughter went to the Senate. Her earliest political advances came through family connections in a sparsely populated state where the Murkowski name carried considerable weight. But complicating the picture was that Frank’s appointment of Lisa to his Senate seat after becoming governor was widely criticized as nepotism. That said, it is hard to find political continuity between the two beyond formal membership in the GOP. Unlike his daughter, Frank was decidedly conservative on social questions.
Lisa Murkowski’s main asset as a national figure, however, is the drooling praise she predictably receives from the mainstream media as a “moderate” Republican. Whether it’s the supposed wickedness of Donald Trump, GOP efforts to oppose a national ban on voter identification, or her reservations about voting for Supreme Court nominees who want to restrict women’s “right to choose,” Lisa gets high grades from our media as a “good” Republican. She is a far better representative of that persuasion than poor Susan Collins, whom everybody knows is forced to compromise in order to extract victories from a left-leaning Maine electorate. If I were trying to get elected or reelected as a senator from Maine, I couldn’t imagine myself voting any differently than Collins.
To me, it is utterly ludicrous that the same media that are behind the Democrats as they try to forbid voter identification nationwide, gush over Murkowski’s complaints about her fellow Republicans trying to federalize elections. Surely the mainstream media can’t be that thick. They must know this shtick is just Murkowski’s latest effort at showing solidarity with the left.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/lisas-latest-leftist-bootlick