Bullets vs. Ballots - Some Food for Thought

As you've probably read by now, the Manchin-Toomey amendment on background checks was defeated in the Senate by fillibuster.  The vote was 54-46 for the amendment, but because you need 60 votes to break a fillibuster the amendment never made it to the floor of the Senate.  Four Democrats - Max Bacus (MT), Mark Pryor (AR), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), and Mark Begich (AK) - joined 41 Republicans (with Harry Reid (NV) switching to "No" on procedural grounds) in defeating the measure, which isn't likely to get another vote in the forseeable future. 

Voter ID Not About What You Think (Well, maybe it is)

This week we saw yet another effort to block Democratic votes denied, this time in Pennsylvania, where a judge blocked that state's restrictive Voter ID law.  The law would have required voters to produce a state issued ID in order to vote.  As over 700,000 Pennsylvanians do not have such an ID, most of them among constituencies that tend to vote for Democrats (minorities, the poor, students, young people) it's pretty easy to see why Republicans were so eager to shove this law through during a year when we're about to re-elect the first African-American president, and why many of them are so upset that they've been blocked...again.  But sometimes when faced with questions of motivations, gain, or possibly even some Freudian like resentment or denial, one has to dig deeper.  I'm wondering if maybe we're all missing a larger point behind Republican efforts to keep people from voting.