State GOP Plays The Race Card

We are hearing that the state GOP has finally thrown all pretense aside and put the race card before a Madison judge.

Once the party of Lincoln, the GOP is fully embracing its inner Jim Crow by asking that special voter ID procedures be required during November balloting only in Milwaukee.

The GOP knows that there has been a hugely-successful voter registration effort in Milwaukee, where the largest number of minorities and Democrats happen to live in our acknowledged swing state.

The GOP is making the 'argument' that because there has been a handful of bad, or allegedly illegal voter registrations attempted (and ferreted out) in Milwaukee there should be mass, court-ordered voter suppression and election-day chaos here.

I can't believe that a judge will approve such an overt, state-sponsored discriminatory scheme.

But shame on the Republican Party of Wisconsin for trying to use the courts to suppress what it knows will be large numbers of minority voters likely to be voting Democratic.

You'd have thought these attitudes would have been put to rest by the US Civil Rights Act, and The Voting Rights Act, or almost 150 years of post-Civil War history, but apparently not.

It's a sign of desparation. Losers behave this way, without confidence.

The sure-to-fail voter ID plan might be aimed solely at further invigorating - - outraging, actually - - the increasingly twitchy GOP base, but I'm predicting that like disingenuous schemes, this one will backfire and help motivate Democrats to get out the vote with even more determination.