Matt Bucher’s commentary has, itself, a lot that is not being said (“What’s not being said about the voting rights bills,” Feb. 10). At the end is this sentence: “No Republican-controlled state legislature has ever suppressed the vote. Plenty of Democrat-controlled legislatures have, and that is a matter of the historical record.”
I immediately did a Google internet search on the string, “vote suppression in states with Republican-controlled state legislatures,” and got back links to many, many articles on Republican vote suppression. Rerunning the search with the word “Republican” replaced by the word “Democrat” gave back links mostly tied — again — to only Republican vote suppression (I read all the titles and text samples on the entire first page of both search results). I would like Mr. Bucher to explain why it is so easy to find so much information that contradicts his information.
Next, there are four paragraphs in his nine-paragraph commentary devoted to filibusters. The tone of these paragraphs made it sound to me as if only the Democrats are the ones that generate filibusters. An internet search on the string, “who uses the filibuster more,” gave, as the first reference, an article on the fact-checking site Repustar entitled, “Did Democrats make record use of the filibuster in the last Congress?” and I quote the fourth paragraph: “Since 2009, 657 filibusters were recorded under Democratic minorities while 609 filibusters were recorded under Republican minorities.” Not a big difference. Under another historical period (1991-2008), it was the Republicans who filibustered more. I think Bucher is cherry-picking information for whatever his case is.
Regarding election integrity, Bucher mentioned the “big lie” (the accusation that Joe Biden stole the election). Well, that is itself turning out to be a big lie. And the big truth, now spilling out of both the “Jan. 6” investigation and all prior news from a month or two before 2020, is that it was really “Donald Trump and cahoots” that was trying to steal the election. All of the 2020 recounts and recertifications — even with many Republican officials, including former Attorney General William Barr (a Republican) agreeing — still showed Biden the winner. Heck, all the polls going back to 2015 showed Trump with very low or lowest popularity. And — in a way — Trump really did steal the 2016 election because he did not get the popular vote; he got the electoral vote by a quirk of the electoral process.
Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson
