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.

DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do things differently in the aftermath of a political crisis: Watergate. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after, and go deep on, stories others don’t. And we’re a nonprofit newsroom because we knew corporations and billionaires would never fund the journalism we do. Our reporting makes a difference in policies and people’s lives changed.

And we need your support like never before to vigorously fight back against the existential threats American democracy and journalism face. We’re running behind our online fundraising targets and urgently need all hands on deck right now. We can’t afford to come up short—we have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

Please help with a donation today if you can—even just a few bucks helps. Not ready to donate but interested in our work? Sign up for our Daily newsletter to stay well-informed—and see what makes our people-powered, not profit-driven, journalism special.

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