“Violent antagonism toward democracy itself, toward the United States and its institutions,” has built among Republicans and their voting base for decades, said Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York magazine. Since the presidency of Barack Obama, she argued Thursday night on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.” Donald Trump brought that antagonism toward democracy into the White House.
A Republican Party already so inclined fell in line behind him. After one impeachment, violent insurrection, and a second impeachment passed in the House, they are still in thrall to Trumpism.
Analyst Zerlina Maxwell added that the party rejected the findings of its post-2012 autopsy that found that “the emerging the emerging demographics of a majority coalition of people of color” meant that to remain competitive in the future Republicans had to soften their racialized stances. They doubled down on racism instead and worked harder to “restrict the votes of people who are in less likely to vote for them.” This, she did not note, had been formalized with the REDMAP program of the 2010 cycle.
What is plain now, Maxwell said, is that Republicans are no longer pursuing any political strategy. “They’re not engaged in this project of democracy that the rest of us are participating in, because they don’t actually want voters to make decisions and elect people.”
Republicans as a party and their conservative base have rejected democracy, as David Frum predicted not-so-presciently in 2018. Trump simply gave a face and a name to white supremacist resentment, violent misogyny, and delegitimization of democracy. Trumpism is less of a mouthful.
Even as Maxwell spoke, Republicans were doubling (or tripling, quadrupling?) down on turning American democracy into a Potemkin village.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that over 100 bills are pending in 28 states that would restrict access to the ballot. Among its findings:
- More than a third of the bills would place new restrictions on voting by mail
- Pennsylvania has 14 pending proposals for new voter restrictions, the most in the country. It’s followed by New Hampshire (11), Missouri (9), and Mississippi, New Jersey and Texas (8)
- There are seven bills across four states that would limit opportunities for election day registration
- There are also 406 bills that would expand voting access pending across 35 states, including in New York (56), Texas (53), New Jersey (37), Mississippi (39) and Missouri (21)
“It was only a matter of time before Republicans in the state of Georgia, bruised by their losses in the 2020 and 2021 elections, used the defeats to try make it harder to vote,” Elliot Hannon writes at Slate. “The other alternative would be to try to win over new voters, but that’s not how the Georgia GOP operates.” Nor does the home office.
Senate Bill 29 would make absentee voters provide copies of their IDs when they first apply for ballots and again when they return them. Now absentee ballots are no longer a predominantly Republican voting method, Republicans see a need to erect barriers to using them. Democrats nearly doubled the number of Republican requests in 2020.
In Florida, Republicans continue their tradition of thwarting direct democracy. Residents passed “Amendment 2” months ago to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by September 2026. So Republican State Senator Jeffrey Brandes of St. Petersburg on Wednesday filed SJR 854. The bill would “reduce the Minimum Wage rate for prisoners in the state correctional system, reduce the Minimum Wage rate for employees convicted of a felony, reduce the Minimum Wage rate for employees younger than 21 years of age, [and] reduce the Minimum Wage rate for other hard-to-hire employees…” reports The Appeal:
The Florida legislature has long treated grassroots ballot initiatives with open contempt. In 2017, after more than 70 percent of state voters elected to legalize medical marijuana, state lawmakers responded by temporarily making it illegal to smoke medicinal weed. In 2018, when a supermajority of Floridians voted to return voting rights to at least 1.4 million formerly incarcerated people, the GOP-dominated legislature passed a glorified poll-tax that made sure that 800,000 of those people remained ineligible to vote. This week, like clockwork, the state Republican Party—dominated by pro-Trump apparatchiks and a smaller Libertarian-minded wing—has launched its plan to kneecap the minimum wage increase, which passed with over 60 percent approval.
It’s only democracy when they agree with voters.
In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won in November:
“Currently, there are two bills in the State House and one bill in the State Senate that targets elections. One bill sponsored by State Rep. Kevin Payne of Peoria would require voters to get their signatures notarized before mailing their ballots in.”
Another measure would purge voters from the rolls “if they have not voted in both the primary and general elections for two straight cycles.”
Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy traveled to Florida on Thursday to make supplication before Trump after failing to overthrow the government for him on Jan. 6. Republicans still want Trump’s help retaking the majority in 2022 under the guise of free and fair elections in which they have long since ceased to believe. State affiliates will gerrymander and block votes any way they can. They do not want to govern. They want to rule.
How do we undo the unraveling? Right now I have no idea.
UPDATE: Added Resnik tweet I’d forgotten.