“We have a system of governance that nobody in their right mind would design,” observes Catherine Rampell in trying to explain Senate rules. The filibuster, reconciliation, and the role of the parliamentarian are “challenging for even journalists to follow along, and we’re paid to understand this stuff,” she laments:
So imagine how difficult it is for regular voters to understand what’s going on. All they know is that Democrats have promised to do lots of big, ambitious things — and then, for opaque reasons, simply aren’t getting them done.
It is even harder to understand for non-news-geeks. They hire politicians every other year to understand it for them so they can go about their daily lives worrying about the myriad of things normal people do.
This week here in one of the country’s “Laboratories of Autocracy,” filing for 2022 races was scheduled to open at noon on Monday. That is, until a North Carolina state court responding to a lawsuit challenging Republican-drawn state legislative and congressional districts issued an injunction just before noon Monday (candidates for local races could still begin filing). Later in the day, a state appeals court overturned the lower court, allowing filing to resume for all races. Then on Wednesday, the state supreme court put a stop to the entire process and moved the planned March primary to May while we sort this out. This is how it started the last time Republicans redistricted the state.
Like Rampell said, it’s challenging for even a political blogger to follow along.
Democracy itself has gotten messy. All that one-person, one-vote, majority rules stuff is no longer intuitive. Marc Elias tries to explain. We’re defining democracy down:
In 1965, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act, the most consequential piece of pro-democracy legislation in our country’s history. President Reagan called it the “crown jewel” of American democracy when it was reauthorized in 1982. In 2006, George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law after it passed the U.S. Senate 98-0.
That was then. This is now.
By 2021, every Republican in the U.S. House and 49 of 50 Republicans in the U.S. Senate would vote against it. As a result, the Voting Rights Act is no longer a bipartisan litmus test for supporting democracy. It is now entirely possible and indeed expected that Republicans who claim to support democracy will also oppose the Voting Rights Act. By engaging in a mass partisan movement to oppose essential federal voting rights legislation, the Republican Party unilaterally redefined what it means, or does not mean, to be pro-democracy. In a sense, Republicans made opposing voting rights legislation the political equivalent of “too big to fail.” The media was simply unwilling to declare the entire GOP in opposition to democracy. Instead, the standard for democracy was lowered to no longer require support for — of all things — voting rights.
In its place, we have created a new test for being considered anti-democratic: support for the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Only those politicians who directly support the attempted coup are now considered extreme enough to be considered anti-democratic. Republicans can spread the Big Lie, express sympathy for the goals of the insurrectionists, and support removing Rep. Liz Cheney from leadership because she wants to investigate Jan. 6, but as long as they did not directly support the insurrection itself, they can pass the test. In short, we are defining democracy down.
Inside the Beltway and in state capitols there are so many examples of Republicans normalizing anti-democratic behavior “that the sheer volume of examples makes the extraordinary seem ordinary.”
Quantum conservatism, I once called it, a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.
We cannot expect better from Republicans, Elias writes,” but it is also time that we stop accepting less”:
Instead, those of us who care about democracy must focus on our own expectations and what we accept as normal or acceptable. We should not accept as normal a system that disenfranchises voters simply because it must do that in order to compete. We should not accept a system where simply opposing a coup is a free pass to support voter suppression. And, we should not accept a system when Republicans are expected to play by one set of rules and Democrats another.
In short, we must demand that our leaders work to expand democracy rather than normalize its contraction. It may be uncomfortable at times to call out Republicans as anti-democratic, but that is what we must insist upon if we are not to allow our democracy to be defined down until it no longer exists.
Elias is being overly polite. The Republican Party is not simply anti-democratic, it is anti-American and pro-autocracy. Republicans are playing a white-nationalist version of Mad Magazine‘s “What They Say and What it Really Means.” They have redefined liberty like they have redefined pro-democracy. What they say is not what they mean. When they promote election integrity they mean vote suppression, election-rigging, and invalidating majority rule where and when it suits them.
Nobody in their right mind would run a democracy like this. But then Republicans are not in their right minds and they do not want democracy.