Legal, But Impossible - GOP's New Authoritarian Strategy

Under Leonid Brezhnev in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union introduced what was known as the "diploma tax", which forced those people who wanted to emigrate from the Soviet Union to pay a fee supposedly equivalent to the cost of the free education they had received from the country. That fee was around 80 times the average Soviet's monthly salary. The purpose of the "diploma tax" was primarily to stop Jews, especially the more educated ones, from emigrating from the country. As far as the Soviets were concerned, Jews were allowed to emigrate as long as they paid the tax, which, for many, was unaffordable. The tax may have been effective at suppressing the brain drain that Brezhnev feared but it didn't stop the flow of less educated Jews out of the country and, under international pressure, its enforcement was subsequently abandoned.

It is remarkable how many current Republican policies and actions resemble the kind of authoritarian tactics illustrated by the diploma tax, namely declaring something technically legal but making it almost impossible to do or get. For example, take a look at what happened in Alabama after the state passed its voter ID law in 2011. In September, 2016, the state announced the closure of 31 offices throughout the state where its citizens could get driver's licenses, leaving a full 28 counties in the state without any office. Since driver's licenses are the primary means of obtaining a government-issued voter ID that satisfy voting requirements, that creates a real problem for those living in those counties. Worse, those counties comprise most of the rural parts of the state predominately inhabited by the poorest Alabamans and minorities. Legal challenges and popular backlash eventually forced the state to revise these plans, but it was clearly a tactic the Republican legislature designed with the specific intent of keeping certain of its citizens from voting.

A similar situation occurred in Georgia this year but, in this instance, the tactic was to restrict access to actual polling places. A plan to close seven of nine polling stations in the predominantly minority Randolph County was again rebuffed by public outcry and outrage. But the fact remains that 8% of the state's polling stations have closed in the wake of the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. One third of the counties in the state have fewer polling stations than they did in 2012 and over half of those counties have significant minority populations.

Yet another example exists in Arkansas right now. There, the Republican-controlled government instituted strict work requirements for those who receive Medicaid. The program began in June and already over 4,300 Arkansans have lost their Medicaid eligibility compared to the 1,000 recipients who finally found jobs. Part of the requirement is that every eligible recipient has to go online and report their hours of work or community service every month. The absurdity behind this policy is that over 25% of Arkansans do not have access to the internet. And those with cell phones primarily are on limited plans so that they actually have to pay the telecom provider in order to comply with the law. Needless to say, the areas of the state with no internet service tend to be the poorer, rural communities where the population is more likely to need Medicaid services. Beyond highlighting the need for government sponsored rural broadband and the telecom oligarchy, it is yet another example of Republicans setting up a program with which it is extraordinarily difficult for the most vulnerable to comply with.

Recently, it appears that the Trump administration is denying passports to people with valid US birth certificates but who were birthed using a midwife rather than within the traditional US medical industrial complex. The ostensible reason for this policy is a question about the validity of the birth certificates for those born in the 1940s and 1950s near the Mexican border. According to one woman, whose parents were born and raised in Kansas, where she was also born, and whose birth certificate had been rejected, was then asked to provide "Border crossing card or green card for your parents issued prior to your birth? My parents were born in the United States….Early religious records? We don’t have any. Family Bible? They won’t accept a birth certificate but they will accept a family Bible?". We have apparently gotten to the point where legal US documents are not considered valid if you were birthed outside the medical industrial complex either because of culture or cost.

A more bizarre situation is occurring with ICE. Apparently, the agency is ordering immigrants to appear at hearings that haven't been scheduled, on dates that don't exist, and at times when court is not in session. According to the Dallas Morning News, "the orders to appear are not fake, but ICE never coordinated or cleared the dates with the immigration courts...Some immigrants have even been given documents ordering them to be in court at midnight, on weekends and on a date the doesn't exist: Sept. 31." The issue seems to have been triggered by a Supreme Court ruling that an ICE order to appear actually contain a date and a time. In response, ICE is apparently inserting random dates and times on their orders in order to comply with the law but not coordinating it with the actual court holding the hearing. For some immigrants, complying with these "fake orders" means traveling hundreds of miles only to find out they never had to be there in the first place. And who wants to wager that at least one of these immigrants will eventually be detained by ICE for "skipping" an order to appear that was impossible to comply with?

Of course, the area where Republicans have been using this tactic for years is in the area of women's rights, specifically abortion. In Texas, the GOP-controlled government passed legislation that cut the number of abortion clinics in the state down to five. Ten urban areas required a drive of over 100 miles in order to just get to a clinic and citizens of Lubbock had to travel over 300 miles. Studies have shown that a distance of over 100 miles reduces legal abortions by one-third and trips of over 200 miles cut the number in half. This draconian law was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court but many of the clinics did not re-open leaving huge swaths of the state without a legal abortion provider.

However, Republicans are nothing but persistent, if not creative. The Eight Circuit Court of Appeals recently agreed that a Missouri law that had the same two provisions as the unconstitutional Texas law, requiring abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital and applying the same standards for ambulatory surgical facilities to abortion clinics, was in fact constitutional. This absurd decision was purely intended to tee this tactic up once again for the newly constituted Supreme Court to declare constitutional now.

Across the policy spectrum, Republican tactics are mirroring the "diploma tax", maintaining a fiction of fairness and legality while effectively foreclosing the exercise of that right. Sure, you can leave the Soviet Union, just pay the tax. Sure, you are entitled to vote, just get a valid ID from an office nowhere near you and go to your assigned polling place which is also nowhere near you. Sure you can get a passport, as long as you are not birthed a certain way because of culture or cost. Sure, you're entitled to Medicaid, as long as you report online from an area where there's no internet service. And sure, you have the right to an abortion, but you'll have to travel hundreds of miles to get it.