Business as usual is foolhardy and dangerous
“You can’t just abandon half the country to extremism,” David Pepper (“Laboratories of Autocracy“) warns Jane Mayer. Ohio Democrats’ former state chair figures prominently in Mayer’s New Yorker portrait of democratic decay in once-moderate Ohio. Pepper has raised that alarm in Twitter white-board videos all year.
Conservative backlash to Barack Obama’s 2008 election has driven Republicans further to the right over the last decade. Ohio is a case study. But the process is replicated in state houses across the country. Arizona, Indiana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin are just a few.
Pepper calls for Democrats to stop putting all their funding into U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races and more on statehouses where gerrymandering is collapsing democracy rapidly. Business as usual is foolhardy and dangerous.
“My God, Democrats, don’t you see it? It’s the statehouse, stupid! That’s where the attack is happening!”
Pepper spotlights Ohio Republicans’ contempt for legislative and judicial restraints on display in a set of unpopular laws loosening gun regulations and the recent abortion ban that sent a raped Ohio 10 year-old to Indiana for an abortion. Indiana Republicans on Friday closed off that option.
Republicans have insulated themselves from the popular will. Their contempt for democracy is palpable in recent gerrymandering lawsuits, as Allison Russo, the minority leader in the House, told Mayer:
This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders. The chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court was herself a Republican. Russo told me, “If norms were being obeyed, we would expect that there would have been an effort to follow the first Ohio Supreme Court decision. But that simply didn’t happen.”
The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. “They contrived a crisis,” Russo told me. At that point, a group allied with the Republicans, Ohio Right to Life, urged a federal court to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperilling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by Trump. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two Trump judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.
On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again.” He continued, “Now I know it’s been a tough night for all you libs. Pour yourself a glass of warm milk and you will sleep better. The game is over and you lost.”
Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”
Pepper emphasizes, “this is not a democracy to them anymore.”
The Lincoln Project looks at the Trumpist embrace of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, a featured speaker at CPAC this weekend in Texas, and sees an authoritarian movement with frightening parallels:
Former Illinois Republican congressman Joe Walsh looks at the mock jail cell antics on display at CPAC this weekend with alarm. Americans are just “having a hard time wrapping our arms around the fact that this is who this party is,” Walsh told CNN’s Jim Acosta. CPAC attendees deny that Jan. 6 was “a big deal or a bad thing.”
“My former political party is fully anti-democracy,” Walsh tells CNN. “It is a fascist political party … that embraces authoritarianism.”
Klaxons are sounding and people are going about business as usual.
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