We’ve all read various news stories about the fact that many of Trump’s policies will adversely and disproportionately affect the idiots who voted for him. Turns out that might not be the case, as Republicans resort to a new twist on one of their favorite ways to insure that the will of the minority prevails.
Let’s step back a bit and recall that it is practically Republican dogma that people who are not working are not working by choice. They are simply lazy. That’s why they argue for getting rid of food stamps, Medicaid, etc., which they claim without end or evidence encourage people to remain in idle poverty. Well, it turns out, much to the surprise of absolutely no one, that white people are not affected by this laziness virus; when they are out of work it is through no fault of their own.
A number of states have asked for permission to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and of course Trump has granted that permission. But they don’t want to impose such requirements on deserving white people, so they have fallen back on gerrymandering. They have proposed exempting people who live in high unemployment areas. Of course, how you define a high unemployment area makes all the difference, doesn’t it:
Those waivers include exemptions for the counties with the highest unemployment, which tend to be majority-white, GOP-leaning, and rural. But many low-income people of color who live in high-unemployment urban centers would not qualify, because the wealthier suburbs surrounding those cities pull the overall county unemployment rate below the threshold.
To no one’s surprise, the end result is that the work requirements will exempt multitudes of white people (who also happen to vote Republican), and almost no black people. If the geographical units used were municipalities rather than counties black people would benefit as well, but of course, in their wisdom, the Republican legislators in the affected states could see that doing it that way would merely encourage shiftless and lazy people to continue to opt not to work.
All of this probably violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, if current precedent were to be followed. However, I’d say it’s even money that this gerrymandering will be upheld by the courts. We have entered a phase of our history when open racism is once again practiced on the political hustings. Those racists are appointing judges, who will license that racism. It will turn out, against all the evidence, that the acts of these legislatures were both race neutral and devoid of disparate impact. Or, the entire notion of disparate impact will be thrown into the trash.
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