GOP Has Declared War-- On Democracy

Liberty Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

Last month, North Carolina Democrats didn't come close to winning with chamber of the state legislature but they did accomplished something very important in both chambers-- they broke the Republican supermajority in each. In the state Senate, the 34-15 Republican veto-proof majority is now a simple 29-21 majority, strong, but not strong enough top override a veto from the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper. Same thing happened in the state House, where the 75-45 GOP supermajority is now 66-54 (6 fewer than what they need to override). So... how is the GOP responding? By rushing through a bunch of anti-democracy bills they know will provoke votes from Cooper before the new legislature is seated when his vetos will stick.

Yesterday, the North Carolina Republican Party decided to try to sweep the stolen congressional election in the 9th district under the rug while passing another voter ID law aimed at making it more difficult for poor people, students and racial minorities to vote. (The first voter ID bill they passed was declared unconstitutional when a federal appeals court found that it was passed with the intent to discriminate against minority voters.

On Wednesday another North Carolina court struck down more legislation passed by the rogue Republican legislature in their lame-duck session to erode the legitimate powers of a Democratic governor-- the same kind of crap Wisconsin and Michigan Republicans are doing now. Yesterday, writing for Vox, Zack Beauchamp reported that the Wisconsin power grab is part of a bigger Republican attack on democracy and that the Republican Party turn against democracy may be a greater threat than Trump is. Only problem with that line of thought is that Trump is very much a part of the Republican Party turn against democracy. "The Wisconsin Republican Party," wrote Beauchamp, "is nullifying the results of the 2018 election. On Wednesday morning, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would seize key powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who defeated incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in November. Walker is expected to sign it in the coming days. The bill blocks Evers’s ability to change state welfare policy and withdraw from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act-- two things he campaigned on. It limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. And this is all happening during the lame-duck session before Evers takes power, rushed through quickly in an explicit effort to weaken Democrats and prevent the new governor from doing what he was elected to do. In essence, Wisconsin Republicans are telling the state’s voters that their preferences will be ignored." Republicans in Michigan and North Carolina are doing the same thing.

These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy.


...The specifics of the power-stripping efforts vary from state to state... but share a fundamentally similar structure. Each one curtails the governor’s ability to make changes to Republican-backed policies like welfare work requirements, and political rules like campaign finance regulation. Republican-controlled legislatures are given enhanced powers to block governors’ moves through measures such as handing them control over state bureaucracies. And these bills all happen during lame-duck sessions, specifically subverting the results of elections that just happened.

...Democracy is premised on the idea that political power is only legitimate when exercised with the consent of the governed. But in reality, people disagree about fundamental political and moral issues; no elected government will ever have 100 percent support of the population, or anything close to it. The purpose of a democratic political system is to bridge that gap: to create a system for resolving these disagreements that everyone thinks is fair. That way, everyone will accept the outcome of the election as basically legitimate even when their side loses.

The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy...[L]iterally stripping powers from officials of the opposing party after they win elections [is] nothing less than a rejection of the idea that the people should get to decide who rules them, a point that many political scientists were quick to highlight after the Wisconsin bill passed.

“By undermining the results of the midterms, the GOP makes a mockery of the notion that elections matter,” Jaime Dominguez, a political scientist at Northwestern University, told me via email. The Wisconsin law is “a breathtaking assault on the most basic democratic norm: the willingness of the loser of an election to let the winner rule,” Yascha Mounk, a fellow at Harvard scholar who studies democratic breakdown, tweeted.

There’s also a broader context. Republicans have, for years now, engaged in a systematic and nationally coordinated effort to rewrite the rules of the political game in their favor. What’s happening in Wisconsin and Michigan is only the latest manifestation of a broader anti-democratic trend, which in the past decade or so has become part of the party’s identity.

The spread of extreme partisan gerrymandering and voter ID laws, tools used by Republicans to marginalize minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies, are the most obvious examples.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) wrote draft legislation that Republican state legislatures around the country quickly and easily adapted into their own voter ID laws. Another effort, Project REDMAP, an initiative of the Republican State Leadership Committee, was a national coordinating committee helping Republicans at the state level put together extreme partisan gerrymanders in the wake of their sweeping 2010 victories.

In both cases, Republican or GOP-aligned organizations at the national level spearheaded a campaign to systematically undermine the fairness of the electoral system. It’s the flip side of the Wisconsin-Michigan-North Carolina laws: Instead of trying to nullify Democratic victories after they happen, they’re trying to change the system so Democrats can’t win in the first place. At times, they’re even honest about it.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country,” North Carolina state Rep. David Lewis, chair of the legislature’s redistricting effort, once said in defense of his gerrymander. And there is simply no parallel on the other side. While state Democrats have certainly gerrymandered-- Maryland being a particularly egregious case-- it’s not nearly as nationally systematic as it has been on the Republican side. And Democrats certainly have not engaged in large-scale efforts to suppress Republican voters or strip powers from Republican officials after they win office. Republican officials don’t seem to feel constrained by the basic, principled norms of democracy the way that Democrats are.

“There’s really an assault on electoral fairness, I would say, in Republican-governed states,” Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die, tells me. “It’s really only in Republican-governed states where this has taken place.”

Republican indifference to democracy is a threat to the system

For most of American history, elections have not been free or fair. Vast swaths of the country were not permitted to vote based solely on their race or gender. Even after voting rights were inscribed in the Constitution, Jim Crow laws and campaigns of racist terrorism prevented African Americans from exercising the right to vote. It’s only recently, really since the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that the United States even approximated a fully egalitarian democracy.

And that’s what makes these Republican moves so alarming. It’s not that Republicans are anti-democratic, in the sense of wanting to tear down American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian alternative. It’s that they’re democracy-indifferent, unconcerned with the fact that their pursuit of power echoes some of the undemocratic practices we’ve seen in both American history and failing democracies abroad.

...“Once partisan goals trump democratic commitments, everything is on the table,” writes Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “Scholars of democratic erosion know how dangerous this situation can be.”

It’s not clear what the bottom is-- when more responsible Republicans will start to see that they’re walking down the same road as authoritarian political parties like Fidesz. Is the Republican Party too far gone, too willing to countenance anti-democratic behavior, to be able to reform itself?

If that’s the case, then American democracy is in serious trouble.

As for "worse than Trump," rather than part and parcel with Trumpism is all about, I hope everyone read Mike Spies' piece in Mother Jones yesterday on illegal campaign coordination between Trump and the NRA. That also undermines democracy, as so much of what Trump does from week to week, as though he is being directed by... oh, I don't know... Vladimir Putin, perhaps? "The National Rifle Association spent $30 million to help elect Donald Trump-- more than any other independent conservative group," wrote Spies, something we've all already read about. "Most of that sum went toward television advertising, but a political message loses its power if it fails to reach the right audience at the right time. For the complex and consequential task of placing ads in key markets across the nation in 2016, the NRA turned to a media strategy firm called Red Eagle Media." There's plenty of strong evidence of coordination-- illegal-- between Red Eagle and the Trump campaign. "[T]he NRA and the Trump campaign employed the same operation-- at times, the exact same people-- to craft and execute their advertising strategies for the 2016 presidential election. The investigation, which involved a review of more than 1,000 pages of Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission documents, found multiple instances in which National Media, through its affiliates Red Eagle and AMAG, executed ad buys for Trump and the NRA that seemed coordinated to enhance each other."

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems more obvious,” said Ann Ravel, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission, who reviewed the records. “It is so blatant that it doesn’t even seem sloppy. Everyone involved probably just thinks there aren’t going to be any consequences.”

Has everyone forgotten where the NRA got all that money for all this Trump campaigning in 2016? Hint: starts with something that sounds like "Poo" and ends with "tin." And now, some good, solid, positive news: