Former lead strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign James Carville had a warning Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Beat” to Republican state lawmakers passing bills voting bills and the Supreme Court reviewing them.
Carville said, “As somebody who was born in Georgia and lived in Louisiana, the right to vote, particularly among black people, particularly in the South, is so ingrained, you cannot believe it. And what they’re going to do, if they pass the stuff they’re talking about in Georgia, I promise you, Ari, this is not going end well. People are not going to take this. They’re not going to work, and they’re not going to have Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis and then have a successful election and have somebody say no, no, that’s not what we’re going to do. We’re going to make it where you can’t be successful anymore.”
He continued, “If John Roberts thinks that Shelby County v. Holder, that’s up there, that was a really horrific Supreme Court Ruling. And I got news. These people live in an ivory tower. They do not understand remotely what the right to vote. You and I, we take it for granted because really, no one’s ever tried to stop us, our parents, our grandparents from voting. Black people take that a lot different than we do. They have a very different view, and they view it as a gained right with their blood and their history, and they’re not going let it go easily. I promise you that I know sometimes you say you know what, white people shouldn’t say what Black people are thinking. This is one white person saying Black people think the right to vote is a hard-earned glorious right that they’re not prepared to give up. I’ll good ahead and say that and take the heat for saying it.”
He added, “The Democrats have got to really frame this argument a lot better and a lot clearer because if we don’t, and these state legislators go through this, and the Supreme Court goes through this, I’m really afraid we’re going have a terrible outcome in this country.”
“They’re not going to be happy. This is an entirely different thing to a population in America. This is the hard-earned much fought for difficult right that has been acquired, and they’re not going give it up easily, nor will people like you, and I be very happy about it either, to be very frank about it. This is a very dangerous game. And, of course, the lawyers admit it. Trump has said it before. Any good researcher can come up with example after example. And they have to limit the franchise because it is the only way that they can win elections.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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