Tomorrow marks three weeks until the election, and I don’t think it’s absurd to say it could be the last fully democratic election in the United States.
The truth is, the United States is a couple hundred years old, but our actual democracy – a system where every American is guaranteed the right to vote?
That started with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our democracy hasn’t even hit the retirement age.
Until that law passed, not everybody had a voice. And the path the Republican Party is on right now will take us back there.
Just last month, they threatened to shut down the government if Democrats didn’t pass the SAVE Act. This so-called “voter ID” bill would add a loophole to election law that would let states disqualify most married women’s votes.
Trust me, that loophole is no accident. They’ve told us what they want to do.
Since 2020, Republicans have elevated advocates of “household voting,” a policy by which married women would lose the right to vote and husbands would have the power to cast a second vote for their wife.
To add to that, J.D. Vance is on the record supporting a future where men get an extra vote for every kid they have. When he was asked about that comment from 2021 this year, he defended it.
His close friend, billionaire Christian nationalist Peter Thiel, whose wealth gave Vance the power he has today, has rallied for ending women’s voting rights for nearly two decades.
Just last year, Trump and Vance’s top supporter and Thiel’s former partner in crime Elon Musk came out in support of limiting voting rights to parents.
Republicans won’t stop looking for ways to reshape or tear down our democracy, whether it’s through a second Trump presidency, bills passed in Congress, or schemes to weaponize election boards like the GOP has done in Georgia.
A friend sent me a passage from a book they were reading a few months back, and this part stuck with me:
"Even in the cradle of democracy, ancient Athens, rule by the people could barely survive for a couple of centuries. And throughout its brief history, Athenian democracy was besieged from within by the forces of oligarchy and tyranny…
“When it comes to the machinations of power, we are all too similar to other societies and ones that have come before us.”
No matter how old our democracy may be, it will always be fragile.
There will always be men and women who seek power and wealth, and they will do anything to hold on to it once they get it. They don’t care if we struggle or suffer, whether that “we” is the average American family or our society as a whole.
Our greatest power right now is our voice, our unity, and our vote.
Let’s finish the fight against MAGA this year so we can get back to fighting for a better future and a better world.
For our generation and the next,
Jerrad Christian
Democrat for OH-12
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