How fitting for William "Vote Suppressor" Rehnquist to swear in Dubya!

[flpoljunkie]

You couldn't make this stuff up!

http://archive.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/11/02/voting_rights/index.html

But we don't need to go all the way back to the Civil War to find a parallel for the plans to keep black Americans from voting this year. Forty years will do. In 1964 there was no Voting Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson had not yet appeared before Congress and, borrowing the words of the civil rights movement, announced to America "We shall overcome." There was still routine harassment of African-American voters at the polls.

That's the function an Arizona judge named William Rehnquist fulfilled for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, a few years before he would lie to Congress about it during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. And in 1964 Fannie Lou Hamer, delegate to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, addressed the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in an attempt to seat the black delegates denied access by that state's Dixiecrat machine.

It's the question Hamer asked during that address -- "Is this America?" -- that has hovered over the entire Bush regime from the moment that Rehnquist, in the apotheosis of the role he played in Arizona in 1964, led the Supreme Court in denying the rights of voters and appointing the president. And it's the question that haunts the polling places today.

[On the Road]

1. As Garrison Keillor Said Four Years Ago,

Bush is being sworn in by one of the five people who elected him.