President George W. Bush once threw everything but the kitchen sink at Saddam Hussein in making his case for invading Iraq. Bad-faith arguments based on questionable intelligence are as disposable as a conspiracy theorist’s factoids. Knock down one and they’ll discard it and pull another off the stack. It’s a quantity-over-quality strategy for winning a war of attrition.
Similarly, what over the last several years became the Party of Trump has attacked small-R republicanism from almost too many angles to count. Republicans are committed to an all-of-the-above strategy for remaining in power and will of the people be damned.
The press and voters have been slow to grasp the breath of efforts by the increasingly reactionary Republican Party to secure minority rule against demographic shifts disfavoring it.
What Trump the First has taught domestic enemies of popular democracy is that tying up opponents in endless litigation is often good enough. Stalemates may not be as good as a win, but they will do in a pinch.
And so the acting president takes his battle to exclude undocumented aliens from the 2020 census to the U.S. Supreme Court (Washington Post):
The unprecedented proposal could have the effect of shifting both political power and billions of dollars in federal funds away from urban states with large immigrant populations and toward rural and more Republican interests.
A three-judge panel in New York said Trump’s July 21 memorandum on the matter was “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to” him by Congress. It blocked the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau from including information about the number of undocumented immigrants — it is unclear how those numbers would be generated — in their reports to the president after this year’s census is completed.
The justices put the case on a fast track and said they will hold a hearing Nov. 30. By then, it probably will be a nine-member court again, if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, giving the court a 6-to-3 conservative majority. The administration says timing matters, because it must present the plan to Congress in January.
It is unclear whether the matter would divide the court along ideological lines, but the issue is another mark of how the oncea-decade census has been transformed from a largely bureaucratic exercise into the centerpiece of a partisan battle.
Honestly, the list of tactics Republican Party flag-wavers deploy to ensure our system is not democratic is so long that even the Brennan Center and the ACLU have trouble accounting for them all:
- Limiting who counts as a person for census purposes
- Gerrymandering targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision“
- Photo/voter ID laws
- Restrictions on acceptable IDs
- Onerous document requirements for voter registration
- Street address requirements for registering in communities lacking street addresses
- Limiting days/times/locations for voter registration services
- Restrictions on ex-felon registration
- Restrictions on voter registration drives
- Violating the “Motor Voter” law by state DMVs
- Restrictions on early voting times
- Siting early voting locations remote to minority neighborhoods
- Restrictions on absentee voting
- Restrictions on absentee ballot drop boxes
- Voter roll purges
- Closing polling places
- Limiting voting machines in minority precincts
- Voter intimidation tactics at the polls
- “Disenfranchisement by typo“
- Decades-long effort to undermine confidence in the election process itself
There are probably more. They are very creative that way.
Update: Added “Closing polling places.”
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