Coming soon to a red state near you
Further evidence this morning that opposition to democracy has become a feature of the Republican Party. And not of the Trumpublican Party, mind you. This trend predates the Menace from Mar-a-Lago.
Will Bunch comments on doings in Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s Texas that merit attention yet again. Texas officials last week announced the state’s takeover of the eighth-largest public school system in the country: Houston’s.
Take note, Bunch cautions:
First of all, the move is outrageous. Despite facing the same struggles as most large urban school districts around poverty and disinvestment, topped by the double whammy of COVID-19 and the natural disaster of Hurricane Harvey, Houston schools have been improving under metrics set by the state. Even the one “failing high school” cited by the Texas Education Agency for its takeover — which will allow the GOP administration to supersede the elected school board and appoint its own superintendent — has raised its grade to a passing “C.”
No wonder most local leaders in the Gulf Coast metropolis think this move by Abbott’s minions has little to do with what’s best for Houston’s 195,000 public schoolkids — 62% Latino and 22% Black — and everything to do with the grown-up politics of punishing a city now run by people of color who vote mostly Democratic, as well as giving Team Abbott a new venue to wage the GOP’s war on what they call “woke education.”
“Woke” now being MAGA-ese for nonwhite. Bishop James Dixon, president of the local NAACP, told U.S. News & World Report the move reflects a pattern in a “war against minority culture and especially African Americans and Latinos.”
Bunch continues:
Increasingly, Republicans are using their control of statehouses in red America to simply override election results in blue-dot localities that they don’t like, but especially when the ballot box winners are the choice of Black and brown voters. In Houston, where seven of Houston’s nine elected school trustees are African American or Latino, the Abbott administration’s moves against the school district accelerated around the same time that the city’s Harris County also elected 19 judges who are Black, female and Democratic.
But nationwide, this isn’t even the worst example of predominantly white Republicans establishing a new “cancel culture” against Black and brown democracy. That would be in Jackson, Miss., where what critics call “a Jim Crow bill” that would take at least some of the judicial system in the Black-majority capital city, and control of the police, away from elected officials and put it into the hands of the heavily GOP statehouse. Although the latest version of the bill has been moderated — perhaps under the sunlight of bad publicity —the measure is still opposed by officials like Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who calls it “plantation politics.”
Readers may recall, as Bunch does, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently removing an elected Democratic prosecutor in Tampa he did not like. Republicans in control of Pennsylvania’s state House chamber “impeached Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner over policy — no misconduct was alleged — less than a year after city voters had overwhelmingly reelected him.”
It’s a bad look for a Republican Party emboldened enough not to care about appearances, Bunch suggests.
For much of American history, the ultimate goal of their movement — white, patriarchal rule, at any cost — was maintained through a combination of populist mob rule and disenfranchisement of women until 1920 and Black voters until 1965. Plan B since that latter year’s enactment of the Voting Rights Act has included less blatant forms of voter suppression — from strict ID laws to felon disenfranchisement — but even that hasn’t prevented the white-dominated GOP from becoming a national minority party, still believing in its entitlement but lacking the numbers.
In 2023, there is nothing subtle about the anti-democratic and arguably fascist bent of this effort. Much attention has understandably been focused on the most blatant manifestation — Donald Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and his supporters’ arguments that state lawmakers can overrule the popular vote in awarding presidential electors. But the essence of their authoritarianism is taking root in the arena where Republicans have the most leverage: The power of GOP legislatures to strip home rule from the blue cities in their jurisdictions.
MAGA-fied, the GOP no longer feels the need to be coy about its antidemocratic sentiments nor to conceal its efforts at power consolidation as a minority party. North Carolina Republicans in November won control of the state Supreme Court. Republican legislators promptly asked the court to rehear a case concerning GOP-drawn redistricting maps ruled illegal partisan gerrymanders by the previous court one year ago. Maps drawn under court order and used in 2022 resulted in a 7-7 congressional delegation in the evenly divided state. Republicans mean to make most of the Democratic incumbents one-termers in 2024.
Then there is Moore v. Harper. The case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court (again, from North Carolina) involves the “fringe independent state legislature (ISL) theory” that would sanction state legislatures overruling the will of voters in assigning presidential electors.
“It is rare to encounter a constitutional theory so antithetical to the Constitution’s text and structure, so inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning, so disdainful of this Court’s precedent, and so potentially damaging for American democracy,” wrote respected conservative circuit court Judge J. Michael Luttig (retired) and others in an amicus brief.
As for Republicans’ moves against public schools, I haven’t the time to link to all the posts I’ve written about GOP efforts to divert states’ mandated public education funding into the hands of for-profit grifters.
Just yesterday, local legislators warned a forum here of GOP proposals to attach partisan labels to candidates in school board races in North Carolina.
They’re using any and every tool at their disposal to secure their grip.