The Cost of Participation: How the SAVE Act Weaponizes Bureaucracy Against Voters

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.

https://www.lincolnsquare.media/p/the-cost-of-participation-how-the