Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: “Before Donald Trump came along, Republican states frequently passed laws to restrict ballot access. Reporters didn’t always pay these laws much attention, and corporations never even considered anything like the retaliatory step announced by Major League Baseball, which has moved the All-Star Game from vote-suppression ground zero in Georgia. But Trump’s crass, frequently euphemism-free style stripped away a lot of illusions. The corporate backlash against Georgia is a template for a broader response to the party’s ongoing effort to curtail the franchise. Conservatives are furious that the latest raft of voting restrictions is being described as ‘vote suppression.’ After all, they point out, voting remains legal. ‘You know what voter suppression is?’ sneered Ben Shapiro. ‘Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.'”

“The notion that election laws should weed out the feebleminded is something close to Republican dogma. The party’s elected officials don’t usually say it aloud, but sometimes they slip up and admit it. ‘Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting,’ the Republican who is pushing through Arizona’s vote-suppression bill recently blurted out. The Republican Party’s enthusiasm for vote suppression predates Trump, and it has become a core tenet of the party’s post-Trump-presidency identity. Vote suppression is an issue that brings together the Trump-adoring base and the elites who tolerated him as a necessary evil – if they don’t agree that Joe Biden stole the last election, they do agree on passing laws that will make it harder for Democrats to win the next one. The fight over vote suppression also brings to the fore the party Establishment’s belief that whatever bad odor they acquired during the Trump years should immediately be dispelled. It was intolerable enough that large sectors of respectable corporate opinion shunned them over their support for a racist, authoritarian president. Now they expect to be treated as respectable again, not as a party still teeming with racist, authoritarian elements. The problem is, this is exactly what they are.”