Selective outrage from the state GOP

A week ago, Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D, restored voting rights to all of the state’s estimated 206,000 convicted felons.

As a good friend of Hillary Clinton, the governor was no doubt at least partially, and perhaps totally, motivated by politics. He wants her to win Virginia in November.

This makes Republicans angry enough to sue. Lawyers have been hired. Outrage abounds.

Never mind that Virginia is one of the few states not to automatically restore voting rights after prison sentences are served. Or that the state’s constitutional provision against blanket rights restoration is rooted in early 1900s racism. Or that Gov. Bob McDonnell, R, automated the rights restoration process for some 100,000 nonviolent felons in 2013, to no Republican outrage.

If a Republican governor had done what McAuliffe did last week, there would be no lawsuit. The issue, as is often the case when it comes to selective outrage, is politics.

Somehow, the state GOP thinks this lawsuit makes political sense. It doesn’t. It merely highlights Virginia’s Jim Crowe history and Republicans’ current challenges in attracting African-American voters.

The lawsuit makes no more political sense than trying to pass a state law to force Virginia localities to keep Confederate monuments (McAuliffe vetoed that).

Felon rights move upends 2017 races

Or than claiming President Obama was born in Kenya (we concede that can get one nominated for president and has perhaps helped keep our Republican congressman, Bob Goodlatte, in the good graces of the angrier flank of his party, at least until this year).

Or than blocking a perfectly reasonable Supreme Court nomination (as if Hillary Clinton — or even unpredictable Donald Trump for that matter — would nominate someone more conservative or qualified than Merrick Garland).

These moves simply draw attention to the fact that Republicans keep losing the big elections. And rather than figure out how to win, the state GOP has defaulted to frustration mode, the kind that has simmered for decades and led some of Congress’s finer adulterers and deviants to push for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998.

That, too, was about politics. Remember, selective outrage almost always is. Impeach. Sue. Question the birth certificate. Call for a hearing. Block the nominee.

Here’s where the state GOP’s focus should lie: On winning elections by advocating for sound public policy on issues that affect daily life.

In an age of Target bathroom boycotts — where politicians seek to “protect women and children” while loose gun laws cause far more harm than imaginary toilet threats — it is easy for the state GOP to pretend this voting rights lawsuit is about something more important than political grandstanding.

It isn’t.

Sometimes, not often enough but sometimes, when politicians take their eyes off what public service is supposed to be about, they lose elections to surprising candidates — think Trump — who promise voters that they’ll finally be seen and heard.

Perhaps if the state GOP concentrated more on constituent needs and less on mindless political maneuver, they’d win a statewide election, thus easing their perpetual frustration.

Our View represents the majority opinion of the

newspaper’s editorial board, Roger Watson, president;

David Fritz, executive editor; and Deona Landes Houff,

community conversations editor.