Voting Is The Least You Can Do Today

We are voting today to be able to vote again. In the 20th Century, women and Black people fought long and hard for the right to vote. They got beat up by the cops, kicked and spit on by white men, arrested and thrown in jail, and some of them even got killed. The Republican party has been working overtime to take us back to those days where women had few options other than reproducing and Black people were kept in their place. The only way they can succeed is if people blow off voting today. Don’t insult the memory of those who fought for your right to vote. If Republicans win, you may never get to do it again.

When Senator Amy Klobuchar asked Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson if she agreed that the right to vote is fundamental during her confirmation hearing she replied, “The Supreme Court has said that the right to vote is the basis of our democracy, that it is the right upon which all other rights are essentially founded.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, a body that gutted the Voting Rights Act 9 years ago, a law that guaranteed that Black people would have the same access to the ballot box as white people. Before the Voting Rights Act they were humiliated and denied the right to vote and were put on the spot to take tests, pay a poll tax, or recite the Constitution. People got their skulls bashed in marching for the right to vote. Today, nearly 60 years later, we have Republican members of Congress who have never read the Constitution nor could they pass the citizenship test.

Reverend Rafael Warnock, the first Black Senator from Georgia, said on the Senate floor in his first speech, “Democracy is the idea of spirit in action.” He said a vote was a kind of prayer.

Some House races today will be settled by 500 votes so get to the polls. Every vote really does count. It’s the least you can do for those who got their skulls bashed in.