The NY Times’ Nate Cohn posted this twitter thread in response to Ron Brownstein’s latest in the Atlantic about HR1 and HR4 the two big voting rights bills that are coming up in the Senate:
Based on this @RonBrownstein piece, it seems the Biden admin’s lack of emphasis on HR1/HR4 reflects their evaluation–and in my view, an accurate evaluation–of the relative threats democracy and Democrats.
According to the article, Biden administration appears to believe that the GOP voter suppression laws, however odious, don’t really pose a meaningful threat to democracy or Democrats.
It does appear to take the threat of election subversion–like refusal to certify–seriouslyOne missed connection here is that HR1/HR4 doesn’t do much to address to election subversion. These are reform bills; they just weren’t conceived to secure the fundamentals of democracy, and the politics around these bills might be quite a bit different if they were.
Another thing missing is gerrymandering. Unlike, say, limiting mail voting, gerrymandering more fundamentally threatens to lower-case ‘d’ democratic values while hurting Ds quite a bit.
Yet, the word appears once in the article, as it’s been overshadowed by the access debateI’ve seen nothing that’s really deliberately focused on this stuff (though there are a few provisions in HR1 that incidentally address a few subversion issues, fwiw)
Originally tweeted by Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) on May 27, 2021.
That last question is a good one. What is to be done about this open usurpation of democracy Republicans are plotting in the swing states? I have no doubt that even if Democrats are able to win landslides, the results will not be accepted and the Republicans in power will overturn the results. I feel pretty confident that the Republicans in congress would back them up and refuse to certify the 2024 presidential election if it doesn’t return a win for them, no matter what the actual results might be.
The GOP correctly perceives that the doors are closing for any legal means to fight these electoral atrocities and they are betting that Democrats will either respond with violence and precipitate a welcome crack down or they will take to the streets with massive protests that end up being as impotent as they usually are. They have fully adopted the “waddayagonnadoaboutit” attitude of Donald Trump.
The Brownstein article is super interesting and spot on. It’s not that the odious vote suppression efforts aren’t a threat because they are. They are blatantly racist, immoral attempts to marginalize voters of color and young voters in order to tilt the scales in favor of older, white Republicans. It’s horrifically unfair that Democrats have to work ten times harder to overcome these partisan hurdles, especially considering the structural hurdles of the undemocratic Senate, partisan gerrymandering and the electoral college, and the Democrats need to pass their voting rights bills so that they can mitigate these unfair hurdles at last a little bit.
But the idea that partisan legislatures and handpicked Republican officials can actually reverse election results is unprecedented and is the most dangerous assault on democracy that we’ve seen in America. It’s the kind of thing you see in dictatorships and juntas around the world.
What’s to be done about this? I don’t know but I think just pretending it isn’t happening is probably not the best idea.