HOW TO MAKE THE EMERGING DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY IRRELEVANT

Everyone says the Republican Party is the party of old white people -- the young are more Democratic and the population is becoming more non-white. E.J. Dionne looks at Wisconsin today and, after laying out the right-wing strategy for delegitimizing unions, reminds us what else Scott Walker's crew is doing:

How do we know this is about power, not budgets? Even as they go after the unions, Walker and his Republican allies in the legislature are also trying to change the makeup of future Wisconsin electorates in their favor. They are pushing to end same-day voter registration (which currently empowers younger voters, who are more liberal than their elders and move around more) and to pass onerous voter ID laws that would especially burden those with lower incomes.

Last week Walker signed into law a bill that will require a two-thirds supermajority in the legislature, or a statewide referendum, to raise income, sales or corporate franchise taxes.... This is an anti-democratic effort to lock in the policies of what could prove to be a temporary conservative majority.

That's the plan: lock in the gains in the short term and disenfranchise or discourage likely Democratic voters in the long term. As I've said here a couple of times, this gets combined with efforts to rally the center as well as the right against an "octopus" that's basically Glenn Beck's, but presented with less hysteria: "greedy" public sector union workers, rootless cosmopolitan liberal elitists with their fancy-schmancy "socialist" Keynesianism and electric cars and high-speed rail and Obamacare, illegal immigrants, etc., etc. The goal is to get whites everywhere voting as much as possible like whites in the South.

Maybe they've overreached this time -- let's hope so. I still don't think they've overreached with older whites, even in blue and purple states. Their goal is to empower those people, and disempower everyone else as much as possible, until they have what they want and it's all but impossible to repeal. Then the demographics of the future won't even matter.