October 23, 2017

Watch Ari Berman Explain How Voter Suppression Handed Wisconsin to Trump

He also breaks down Thomas Farr’s history of defending voter ID laws.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to advance President Donald Trump’s pick for a lifetime seat on the Eastern District of North Carolina, Thomas Farr. The Republican lawyer has a history of defending voter suppression laws, including a 2013 law in North Carolina that the NAACP called a “monster” for restricting the right to vote.

Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman on Sunday sat down with MSNBC’s Joy Reid to discuss Farr’s controversial nomination, as well as Berman’s recent cover story examining how similar voter suppression measures effectively handed the crucial state of Wisconsin to Trump in the 2016 election.

“If we don’t learn this lesson, if we don’t learn the lesson that voter suppression works and you have to fight to protect the right to vote, history is going to repeat itself in 2018 and 2020,” he told Reid.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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