The Facts Machine

"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post discussing the implications of moving election day to the weekend, introducing a website called whytuesday.org in the process.

I am, as you'd expect, absolutely, 100% in favor of weekend elections. With that in mind, I'd note that the Republicans have compromised their one possible line of argument against such a change, and that argument -- "It's too expensive!" -- was never that good of an argument anyway. If you think about it, Iraq has undercut this view. We're pouring billions and billions of dollars into Bush's Iraq project, and the reason they give us, ostensibly, is for the promotion of democracy. And remember, it's billions and billions more that they were planning to spend (see comments from Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, and hell, Bush himself). If they're willing to spend upwards of 200 to 300 billion for democracy in Iraq, how about of miniscule fraction of that for democracy here?

Mark is right that Democrats should jump on this issue when they get Congress back. Until the issue is dealt with, there will be a de facto three-fifths clause in place for America's working poor.