"Voting is a Privilege, Not a Right"

That would seem to be the mindset of the Confederacy party. That's the rationale behind their push to prevent students and minorities from voting: That the ability to vote should be limited to older white folk.

The Speaker of the House in Minnesota, some sheet-wearer named Kurt Zellers, has that view of voting. By "privilege", that means that the state can deny you the chance to vote if they feel like it, just like they can take away you driver's license.

Or course, now having shared with the public what he really thinks about voting, Zellers is trying to walk it back. Because that pesky document, the United States Constitution, in Article I, Section 2, as well as Amendments 14, 17, 20 and 27, would tend to hold otherwise.

But that's the thing about the Confederacy party, as well as the Teabaggers: They love them the Constitution, until it tells them something that they don't like. The older Confederates wrote the book on denying people the right to vote, which they enforced with both the mechanism of the state and with night-riders. Both the cops and the Klan killed dark-skinned people who tried to vote and they did that for many decades.

The modern Confederates are just trying to be more subtle about it. Their aims, however, are the same as they always have been.