The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Black voters in their eighties to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters.

It’s a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan: “If you can’t win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn’t get you over the top, intimidate!”

As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women’s voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote.

We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.

DeSantis put together a special police force to go after “voter fraud,” and they executed a number of arrest warrants against Black voters who’d been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were. There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved.

(With 64 percent support, Florida’s voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election giving voting rights back to the roughly 20 percent of Florida’s Black citizens—1.5 million potential voters—who’d had a felony conviction. The Republican-controlled state legislature then—quietly—essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many Black voters never got the memo.)

With cameras rolling,........

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