The Cost of Participation: How the SAVE Act Weaponizes Bureaucracy Against Voters
Why is CNN commentator Van Jones laundering Donald Trump's voter suppression bill?
Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
On the same morning that the news broke about the death of Jesse Jackson, I found myself writing two very different pieces. One was about a man whose life was spent building coalitions, organizing workers, expanding political power for the marginalized, and defending the sacredness of the vote. The other—unfortunately—was about Van Jones trying to both-sides the SAVE Act.
In my piece on Jesse Jackson, I wrote about his role in the civil rights movement, about Operation PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition, about how he understood that voting rights were not abstract constitutional poetry but practical power. Jackson didn’t treat voting as a vibes conversation. He treated it as infrastructure. He knew that legal rights mean nothing if people cannot access them. He knew that the fight was not simply to declare the franchise, but to protect it from those who would narrow it through paperwork, intimidation, and bureaucracy.
Which is why it pains me that on that very morning I had to pivot to this nonsense known as the SAVE Act and the deliberate ignorance surrounding it.
If Stephen A. Smith is the crown prince of the both-sides movement, then Van Jones would have to be the idiot savant of both-sides theater. And what makes it frustrating is not that Jones is unintelligent. Quite the opposite. He is not a dumb man. I would go as far as to say he is a smart man, a learned man. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Tennessee at Martin and his J.D. from Yale Law School. Yale. Not YouTube Law School. Not Vibes University. Yale.
Which means he knows better. And if he doesn’t know better, he certainly has the intellectual horsepower to do the research. He has the capacity to read legislation, examine historical precedent, review scholarship, and understand disparate impact. I do it. Columnist on Lincoln Square do it. Plenty of independent journalists do it. He can too.
And yet here we are.
To say this quote from Van Jones in my newsfeed raised my blood pressure would be an understatement. It reads:
“Voter ID is not unreasonable. How hard it is to get ID’s in poor and rural communities is unreasonable. We can fix both.
Democracy requires two things: fair access TO the ballot — and fair counting OF the ballots. Right now, neither side trusts the other. That is unsustainable.
When both parties distrust elections, democracy is in danger.
That is where we are. But I believe there is a way out.”
My God, there is so much to unpack here.
Let’s start with the most obvious lie and both-sides posture.
This narrative is a lie.
The idea that “both sides” do not trust elections is a lie. It is demonstrably false. It sounds like it was pumped out of the CNN both-sides oxygen journalism factory, packaged for polite panel discussion.
To all Lincoln Square readers, I am telling you right now, full chest: the claim that both sides equally distrust elections is pure, unadulterated, grade-A horseshit.
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