Republicans are fighting a cold civil war
“The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) said recently of scattered rural militiamen. Elected Republicans in control of state legislatures don’t need AR-15s to fight their cold civil war. They are manipulating democracy to undo democracy in full view of state capitol and national press.
The Republican majority voted to expel three Democrats from the Tennessee state House last week for what they insisted were breaches of decorum in loudly calling for action against gun violence. They kept the white woman, Rep. Gloria Johnson (barely), and expelled two young Black men. The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 36-0 Monday to reinstate Justin Jones to the position Republicans revoked last week. Justin Pearson of Memphis is expected to be reinstated when the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meets on Wednesday.
Pardon the cliche, but if you haven’t noticed that MAGA Republicans have declared war on representative democracy, you haven’t been paying attention.
Additionally, says Democracy Docket‘s newsletter, “a Tennessee court blocked House Bill 48, which would force Nashville — and only Nashville — to cut the size of its Metro Council in half. Two lawsuits argue that the law disenfranchises voters and violates the state constitution.”
Yes, there’s more: “On Friday, the Montana House passed Senate Bill 117 on a party-line vote, which would ban state, county or local officials from accepting private donations to fund election administration. It now heads to the desk of Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) for his signature.”
Now, why would such a bill be necessary? Should GOP-dominated legislatures cut budgets to state boards of elections, private donors and foundations are prohibited from taking up the slack with (as derided on the fringe right) “Zuck Bucks.” When short funding precipitates election snafus and allegations of misadministration, democracy itself is to blame, see?
Democracy Docket adds:
Since 2020, 23 states have enacted legislation targeting private election administration grants, whether banning completely or severely regulating. Five other states (Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) saw such bans vetoed by Democratic governors.
In 2023, the trend does not seem to be slowing down. A proposal banning outside grants for election administration in Arkansas already has 64 Republican co-sponsors in the state Senate. There are similar bills introduced in Connecticut, Minnesota and North Carolina.
Rick Hasen and Dahlia Lithwick report at Slate that Republicans’ efforts are accelerating. The Guardian and Documented reported last week on a secret February conference aimed at holding down Democratic voter turnout. You’d be forgiven for missing it, the pair write: “We are all living in Steve Bannon’s Trumpian dreamworld in which ‘flooding the zone with shit’ has become a remarkably successful political tactic.”
The Fraudulent Fraud Squad has been at this for decades, as I’ve detailed again and again and again. They are well-funded and relentless:
What’s clear from the new reporting, and what may have flown somewhat under the radar last week, is that this is no longer just a lobbying effort shored up with big, often untraceable money, coming from players outside the system. What’s no longer hidden is the involvement of lawmakers and their staffs, who say the quiet parts out loud. Their enthusiastic participation in these efforts shows that these groups are not offering false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud merely to raise funds or even to delegitimize Democratic electoral victories by convincing the Republican base that when Democrats win elections, it is inevitably by fraud. Instead, the conference is powerful evidence of coordination between the decades-old voter fraud-industrial-complex and state and government officials who actually have the power to make rules over how elections are run. To put it in its simplest, the election suppression noises are truly coming from inside the house.
Participants at the conference no doubt learned the lesson we all gleaned from the aftermath of the 2020 election: No matter how much proof investigators, courts, and journalists amass to show that voter fraud is rare and almost never swings American elections, significant portions of the Republican base will always believe the false claims. Indeed, the more evidence they hear that there is no such thing as large-scale election day vote fraud, the more it leads them to distrust the investigators, courts, and journalists who attempt to debunk them. Those false claims then serve as the predicate to pass yet more laws intended to make it ever harder to vote for some voters seen as likely to vote for Democrats—including poor voters, minority voters, and students. Never mind that sometimes these laws deter Republican voters and could actually cost Republicans elections. The important thing is to puff up the lie in order to justify draconian state legislative responses. And the participation of state entities that once took pride in serving as non-partisan officials who sought only to administer elections fairly and efficiently prove that it is becoming vanishingly rare for election officials in the Republican Party to distance themselves from whatever formulation of the Big Lie best serves them, whether they personally believe it or not.
The Sun Also Sets
I am alarmed, frankly, by events in Nashville. Republican authoritarians mean business. Yet, Democrats in the states and in D.C. seem not to believe what their eyes are seeing. Nor are they mobilized to fight Trumpism with more than politics as usual. The “Tennessee Three” get it. But how many of the rest of us?
Benjamin Franklin remarked at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that we had formed a republic if we could keep it. If we are not prepared today — mentally and in our guts — for the fight MAGA Republicans are already waging against that representative democracy, future historians may ask Democrats hiding in caves how we lost it. As Hemingway wrote, “Gradually, then suddenly.”