While watching my favorite cable news channel, (i.e., MSNBC, no surprise there), I'm listening to Nicolle Wallace having a discussion with Oregan senator Jeff Merkley concerning the impasse in the Senate over passing - and extending - the Voting Rights Act. (Until now, the Voting Rights Act had been routinely voted on and extended by the Congress every four years since its original passage in 1964.) As Senator Merkley pointed out, going all the way back to 2006, Republicans - including Mitch McConnell - routinely voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. So, what's different this time?

In 1948, when he was running for the United States Senate against the incumbent California senator Helen Geoghan Douglas, congressman Richard Nixon stirred up a lot of controversy when he had a pink flyer printed (and distributed at his rallies) accusing Mrs. Douglas of being "pink down to her underwear." Being called "pink" in those days was a euphemism for harboring communist sympathies and thus being "Anti-American" by default. Needless to say, this accusation [by Nixon] led to a great deal of anger and acrimony, but it also worked. In the age of McCarthyism and rampant paranoia about communists "infiltrating our government and destroying our way of life;" Nixon's dirty [underhanded] tactic got him elected. (It was this "pink" flyer that earned Nixon the nickname of "Tricky Dicky" long before Watergate.)

Years later a biographer writing a book about Nixon asked him why he had produced and distributed that pink flyer knowing full well that such a stunt was likely to label him for life as a dirty trickster? Nixon responded: "But you don't understand ... The thing is, you've got to get elected."

So it is today with extension of the Voting Rights bill. Republicans suddenly realize that if they don't make access to the ballot box as difficult as possible, (and suppress as many [likely] Democratic votes as possible), they could fall victim to Nixon's Number One Rule of Politics: "You've got to get elected." Democrats (like Senator Merkley) are moaning and complaining about Republican hypocrisy and the sudden lack of "bipartisanship" in the Senate over a bill that is "so vital to the functioning of our democracy". It's not that at all. It's pure power politics, plain and simple.