Nicolle Wallace has really grown on me. There’s nothing quite like the zeal of the “born again.” In her case in the political sense.
On her Thursday MSNBC show, Wallace spotlighted just how dangerously her former party has turned on the country, calling its actions malevolent, cynical and anti-democratic. Her launch pad on the day after William Shatner finally flew into space was Marc Elias’s essay at Democracy Docket making clear (again) in how much jeopardy the Republican agenda has put this country’s democracy:
We are one, maybe two, elections away from a constitutional crisis. More than a year ago — before Election Day — Donald Trump made clear that he would not accept the results of free and fair elections if he did not win. Too few people paid attention, discounting it as the ravings of a soon-to-be failed candidate. In the days following the November 2020 election, Trump and his allies executed a plan to subvert the election results. While they failed, Republicans learned from the experience and are prepared to try again. The future of our democracy rests on whether those committed to free and fair elections will prepare as well.
Immediately following the insurrection on January 6, Republican state legislatures began laying the groundwork for 2022 and 2024. They enacted new voter suppression laws optimized to disenfranchise Black, brown and young voters. They created false narratives of election irregularities and rallied their supporters around the Big Lie. Most recently, they began using their power in the redistricting process to ensure Republicans control the U.S. House over the next decade.
Meanwhile, Democratic efforts in the states have been more limited. Where they control state power, Democrats have not expanded voting rights at the same pace as Republicans have restricted them. New York still has many restrictive voting laws, including a ban on providing food and water to people waiting in line at the polls. Virginia requires an ID to vote in person and a witness signature to vote by mail. Colorado, which prides itself on its vote-by-mail law, rejected 29,000 mail-in ballots, two-thirds of which were from voters under the age of 35.
Republicans have moved on from alleging voter fraud and passing crafty laws for restricting access to the ballot box. They now are engaged across the country in subverting elections on the back end after votes have been cast, and in manufacturing fraud where none exists to justify doing it.
Watch the Deadline White House segments:
Former Republican Matthew Dowd, now a Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor in Texas, says Donald Trump and Republicans have no interest in seeing themselves held accountable through voting.
“Donald Trump has no respect, no respect for his own voters. None! Because if he says, basically, because if I didn’t get what I want, you shouldn’t vote at all. You shouldn’t vote in an election, you shouldn’t participate in an election that may actually improve their lives.” Because of personal grievance.
Rick Stengel loosely quotes Thomas Paine: “The right [to vote} … is the primary right by which other rights are protected.” “Voting rights and the suppression of the vote are two flip sides of the same coin,” Stengel says. “and the Republican party is trying to do both at the same time.”
“Republicans love talking about … how the Constitution protects minority rights, and it does, but it doesn’t protect the minority that is trying to disenfranchise the majority. And that is what’s happening now.”
One of the panelists disagreed with Elias. The constitutional crisis is not out there in the future. It is here right now. And Democrats in Congress don’t seem to acknowledge it as the clear and present danger it is.
Given that Trump is threatening to bring down Republicans’ party on their heads, it would be ironic if the twisted man whose gut is all grievance saved the country accidentally the way Gollum saved Middle Earth from Sauron.
But we cannot count on accidents. Democrats have to step outside the box and act decisively.