The other side’s public policy agenda, items like ending the ACA, is one thing. It rightly attracts considerable attention on these pages. Public policy is, after all, is the only reason that people of common sense and common decency care about politics. We want to gain power to do good things. But we’re talking about Republicans here, so we need to think like them at least enough to understand what they are likely to do. And they have a power agenda, a list of things they want passed into law to gain and retain power, not to pass any public policy agenda.
And really, it isn’t at all clear that they really want any particular public policy change. Do they really want to repeal the ACA? A few of them, I guess. But even among their radicals, opposition to the ACA, claims that what is basically Romneycare is actually the worse than anything Stalin ever did, don't seem to have been based nearly so much on ideology -- public policy differences -- as on the opportunities it created for gaining power, for humiliating and dominating the Ds. Now that they've got the trifecta and the ACA has exhausted its usefulness as a bludgeon, they aren't really interested in getting rid of it. Well, they are far from unified in their desire to end the ACA.
What public policy are they unified in wanting?
My idea is that we are much more likely to see them unify behind a power agenda, what they can do to preserve their hold on the trifecta, even if, perhaps precisely because, they really don’t know what to do with their power.
The obvious way to hold onto power in a representative democracy, is to control who votes, and under what conditions they vote. No matter how little they do with their power, and no matter how badly they flub whatever public policy they actually get around to implementing, there is some segment of the electorate that will keep on voting for them. Keeping that befuddled and/or self-interested minority of the country as the majority in the electorate is the central task of any R power agenda. Voter suppression has been one thing they have been able to agree on, and while they lacked the trifecta at the federal level, they assiduously pursued it at the state level, with Voter ID and other scams designed to suppress the D vote under cover of protecting against voter fraud, or some other form of the “wrong" people voting.
What more could they do in the way of suppressing the D vote? They now have the opportunity to do things at the federal level, and not just in the states they control, but since suppressing D votes differentially runs up against both constitutional and public relations acceptability, it will still be useful for them to try out new means of voter suppression in the states, those Frankenstein laboratories of democracy suppression.
Residency Verification
What they’re going to do next in the way of voter suppression is residency verification. There are plenty of names on voter rolls registered to vote in two different places. While most of these are really two people with the same names, even after you exclude those, that leaves plenty of cases where the same person actually is registered at more than one location.
It should go without saying that of course this doesn’t have any actual connection to voter fraud. People end up registered in more than one place because registering at your new address doesn’t cancel the older registration automatically, as any reasonable system would. If these multiple registrations were being used to steal votes, to vote more than once in the same election, we would know all about it because, while how you vote is not traceable, whether or not you voted in a given election is a matter of at least semi-public record. This has been looked at, and while there are tons of cases of multiple registrations, there just aren’t more than a scattered handful of cases of multiple voting, nothing that comes close to changing the results of elections.
It should really go without saying that the proven lack of threat from multiple residence registrations will have zero impact in keeping Rs from using the bogus threat to suppress the vote. And the thing they will do to address this non-problem will absolutely not be the sensible measure, setting up a nationwide registration system that does cancel your old registration when you move and register at your new residence. They will instead go for residence verification as a requirement for staying on the voting rolls.
The advantage to the Rs of residence verification requirements is the same as that for Voter ID. It inherently creates a gradient that works to suppress the D vote selectively, by creating a barrier to voting that their voters can navigate with less trouble than ours.
Residence verification would work to create a gradient of suppression by making the process automatic for homeowners, but not for renters. The rationale would be that homeowners have already paid to record their mortgages, and that recordation would be taken as having already completed the verification of residence, and so homeowners would automatically be registered to vote. But people who rent don't have any sort of legal record already on file that they actually live where they claim to live. They will be required to complete some other form of verification of residency.
Now, in order that the residents of higher end rental accommodations not be in any way inconvenienced, there will be a mechanism for the landlord to verify residency. No matter what the cost of this verification to the landlord, the low end renter will see a much larger relative cost compared to high end renters. And just folding the costs into the rent will not be allowed, because people have a sacred right to not register to vote, dammit, and so opt-in to verification, and its costs, will be required. And the gradient wouldn't just be one created by the direct cost paid to complete the verification. The courts might look on any non-trivial verification fee with suspicion as just another sort of poll tax. The trick is that this verification will be subsumed into the voter registration process, and thus will bring with it the potential for criminal penalties for voter fraud if the landlord verifies something that isn’t true. That’s the expense that can be imposed on renters — and still pass constitutional muster — to deter them from verifying, the expense the landlord must go to doing their own verification to avoid participating in voter fraud.
Residency verification could thus be structured so that people likely to vote D would have to go though the process on their own. Even without user fees so high as to impose much direct burden, taking the time to do this will result in much more voter suppression than the Rs have gotten from the Voter ID scam.
Imagine how the electorate in your area would change if you left in the homeowners, but subtracted the renters. My area, the currently deep blue northern VA, would vote solid R every election. Just take away 50% of the renters and we still go red. Take away only 5-10% of renters, and maybe NoVA still goes blue, but not by enough to make it possible for us to win any statewide election. What does your area look like in terms of homeowner vs renter voting patterns?
Of course this form of voter suppression, making it harder for renters to register, would differentially suppress the vote of ethnic minorities, and not just the poor (which is itself as constitutional as church on Sunday!). Perhaps the Warren Court would have been able to see that, but that’s not the SCOTUS we have today, is it? Voter ID was never going to do much for the Rs, though, sure, every fraction of 1% counts in a close election. But it was useful, wasn't it, to test the judicial waters? Voter ID also differentially burdens minorities, but indirectly, and, as we have seen, not so openly that the current courts can see any discrimination. Perhaps Voter ID has served simply as the test case, the proof of concept that residency verification will survive judicial scrutiny.