Consent of the governed? Bah!
Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has seen it in North Carolina (2016). And Gov. Tony Evers in Wisconsin (2018). Voters’ choices pitted both Democrats against hostile Republican-dominated state legislatures. Before even taking office, Republicans in lame duck sessions, with support from outgoing Republican Govs. Pat McCrory and Scott Walker, stripped powers from the incoming Democratic governors.
If Jan. 6 and GOP election-denying in its aftermath did not clue you in, political niceties such as respecting the will of voters is not part of the Republican playbook. Raw power is. Richard Nixon torpedoed the Paris Peace Talks in 1968 to win his. Operatives for Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1980 delayed for months the release of Americans held hostage in Iran ahead of his election and inauguration. Power mattered more. Neither paid a personal price for the resulting deaths and extended captivity of Americans.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, reminds Slate readers that Republican power stripping of the sort deployed against Cooper and Evers has not stopped.
After disturbing photos appeared in 2020 of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s visit to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, the Kentucky senator pressured the GOP-controlled legislature to strip the governor (then a Democrat) of the power to appoint a successor without restrictions in the case of a vacancy. That power resides in the governor in 35 states.
McConnell “urged and the Kentucky legislature took the step of changing that state’s law—overriding the veto of the governor to do so—in a way that assured that Republicans would maintain control of McConnell’s seat should it become vacant.”
Ifill explains:
This effort—to remove powers from elected representatives who are Democrats—has become the new method of disenfranchising voters and maintaining perpetual Republican political power. And it is being undertaken with alarming frequency and speed across the country. This may be the most dangerous and efficient structural attack on our democracy. Its threat, and pernicious ingenuity, lies in its ability to make voting itself irrelevant. Voters may turn out in high numbers and elect their candidates of choice, but if the official is not one whose views align with those of the Republican Party, they may find that their powers of office are removed by antagonistic GOP-controlled legislatures.
Examples in the news recently are Republicans stripping elected reform-minded prosecutors of their powers, if not their jobs. “Prosecutors who prosecute or investigate the wrong kind of criminal suspects in the eyes of Republican legislators have also received this treatment,” Ifill notes. She references recent cases in Florida and Missouri.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis faces backlash from Georgia’s GOP-dominated legislature for having the temerity to investigate former president Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results there.
In the wake of what were reported to be “imminent” indictments resulting from Willis’ investigations, the Georgia legislature passed a legally dubious bill that would create commissions empowered to remove elected prosecutors from office.
Indeed, bills have been filed in more than a dozen states to remove power from reform-minded prosecutors from Polk County, Iowa to Mississippi. Black women prosecutors have been the high-profile face of the targets of these challenges. But other reform-minded prosecutors have also faced well-financed recall or Republican legislative impeachment efforts since 2020.
Where once Republicans (and Democrats under 100 years of Jim Crow) deemed it sufficient to prevent the wrong kind of voters from casting ballots at all, the GOP has added making voting itself irrelevant to their efforts to consolidate power in the post-Civil Rights era.
Now, this practice of power re-allocation, as with all voter suppression techniques first work-shopped on Black communities in the South, has metastasized into a national phenomenon. Unchecked it will make the act of voting a Potemkin exercise, and upend the very concept of representative government. This is an efficiently sinister effort to solidify one-party rule. Its geographic breadth and reach to offices both high and low, requires a national legislative response. With Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, the prospects are dim. But this should be powerful motivation for congressional Democrats and indeed for all Americans who wish to live in a democracy—to turn out and vote this year and next—in essence to save the framework of democracy while there’s still time. It should be clear now that for the foreseeable future, democracy remains on the ballot.
Until the GOP can do away with elections entirely. They tried that and failed just two short years ago. Again, without senior leaders paying any personal price for the ensuing deaths and mayhem. The power of the governed to hold them accountable at all is next on the menu.