Reince Priebus

In the interests of civil discourse, I will pass over the obvious crack about his name sounding like one of the steps of washing a hybrid car.

Some of what has been written about his law firm working to help its clients obtain stimulus funds or point out how the health care law can benefit its clients. Well, no frakking shit, that's what law firms are supposed to do.

What bothers me more, though, is that the Wisconsin GOP, of which Mr. Priebus was the chairman, engaged in "voter caging". Vote caging is a polite way of saying "voter suppression", a strategy to prevent people from voting, to deny them their constitutionally-granted right to vote.

Voter caging differs, only in degree, from the days when Southern nightriders, the White Citizens' Councils and sheet-wearing Klansmen used intimidation and violence to keep Black people from going to the polls. Voter caging is age-old racism in a three-piece suit.

For that reason, Mr. Priebus bears watching as the head of a political party that has, as a working strategy, the denial of the right to vote to American citizens.