Can anyone tell me," asks Gourley, a veteran mock electioneer, "why you don't want the polling place in the cafeteria?"

Stephen, a shy antiabortion activist sitting toward the rear of the class, raises his hand: "Because you want to suppress the vote?"

"Stephen has the right answer!" Gourley exclaims,…
-- An exchange at Morton Blackwell's "Leadership Institute" in 2005
Paul Gourley,
Treasurer,
College Republican National Committee

Cynicism is tiring. Unfortunately, cynicism carries not rewards but deserved warrant. And that warrant was served, yet again, by the US Supreme Court, which "upheld" Indiana's "voter identification law" by a vote of 6-3. It seems that SCOTUS is waking up to that fact that many have noticed the rather astounding number of 5-4 decisions weighted in favour of curtailing civil rights, upholding discrimination and coddling corporations. They must have had a huddle. I can almost hear Scalia in the back room scrum, growling,

Stevens! You dottering fart! Get in line! We can't have another 5-4. People are beginning to notice!

But who knows? I doubt they care all that much.

It was a result that cynicism had predicted for me back when news broke that the legal battle over the specious law would go to the Supreme Court. We all new this would be the "decision," but everyone pretended like actual legal arguments had to be made in front of the current band of ideological benchwarmers, as though no one could imagine that the Roberts' Court would side with another restriction of civil rights. These days, every legal argument taken up in front of the Supremes seems like a pretense. Most of the "justices," and certainly the recent additions, have their minds made up before they hear a word. Ideology is like that. If there is a position they can take in favour of government secrecy, vote suppression, civil rights abrogation, or cosseting corporate interests, why, they will take it before the first legal shot is fired.

Predictably, there will be legalistic discussions, some quite dense, arguing about the "relative merits" of the various concurring and dissenting opinions. All of it will be farce, an ex post facto attempt to provide cover and justify an opinion supporting an obvious and partisan Republican assault on voter's who probably won't vote for them. The facts surrounding this law are clear: "voter fraud" as a crime barely exists. But the law must stand because, in the fevered imaginations of Republican operatives, the fictitious and wholly imagined threat is indeed a real and pressing problem. Actually, I doubt Republican operatives imagine this, at least not the higher level one (see Paul Gourley above).  As do most sentient beings, they know for what end such laws are really designed. But they cannot say this. They insist that a vast voter fraud conspiracy exists and will persist without draconian measures, and this insistence boils and gurgles in the fetid muck we know as the "base" of the Republican party, who convince themselves that those poor black folk and their fellow elderly connivers perpetrate voter fraud to a frightening degree. They tell themselves it is all a scandal! a plague! Appropriate action must be taken.

Depending on what new "scandal" can be generated about Obama, or upon what old ones they may dredge up, we might not even enjoy the sight of television talking heads discussing this latest affront to American democracy. Because they certainly won't talk about it like that. We will perhaps watch as the yappers on the air haul up a coterie of "legal analysts" who will discuss the technical wherefores and legal why-nots as though they think this decision was made by weighing legal argument and fact against a concern for this country's most marginalized citizens and their right to vote.