It took the GOP just 20 years
Here in North Carolina, this New York Times essay by Margaret Renkl strikes very close to home. Where Republicans are in charge, spite drives policy and rationality takes a holiday. Here or just west in Tennessee, blue cities have targets painted on them:
Last year, when Nashville’s Metro Council voted not to support the state’s bid for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, retaliation was widely understood to be inevitable, according to Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News.
Now we know what shape retaliation will take: Last week, on the first day of the new legislative session, Republicans in both the Tennessee House and Senate introduced legislation that would cut our Metro Council in half. (The bills ostensibly apply to all city governments with a legislative body larger than 20 members, but that’s just Nashville.) If passed, the law would overturn not only a 60-year history but also the will of the Nashville people, who voted in 2015 to keep its 40-member council intact.
The new bills set a “dangerous precedent,” according to the Democratic House caucus chair, John Ray Clemmons. “The G.O.P. supermajority’s continued efforts to overstep into local affairs and usurp the decision-making authority of local officials for the purpose of centralizing more and more power at the state level is concerning,” Mr. Clemmons told The Tennessean. “Ultimately, Nashville families know what’s best for Nashville.”
Remember that oft-quoted Jeffersonian maxim that “government closest to the people serves the people best”? That once was gospel for Republicans. As you’ve guessed, it was as deeply held as Rep. Elise Stefanik’s principles. Preemption is now in vogue where the GOP dominates state legislatures, Renkl observes:
There is, of course, a long history of legislative pre-emption in Tennessee. The tactic is also used by Democratic-controlled legislatures, but it is especially egregious in Southern states governed by Republican supermajorities. Just last week, another state lawmaker here introduced a bill that would ban local governments from helping residents fund out-of-state abortions — a policy that members of Nashville’s council have already proposed.
It’s no surprise that the party of voter suppression and disenfranchisement is also the party of undermining local governance. But it’s worse this year, or at least it feels worse this year, because this year Nashville voters can’t count on representation at the national level either.
The minoritarian design of the U.S. Senate and surgically precise House gerrymandering left in place by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 (Rucho v. Common Cause) have seen to that. Thanks to that decision, Nashville finds its residents represented “by three of the most militant right-wingers the state has ever elected.”
The GOP’s leveraging minority rule it has effectively engineered is now an issue not just in Nashville but among cities across the country where state capitols are MAGA-controlled.
Mark E. Green, an ardent Trump supporter who represents Tennessee’s Seventh District, which now includes parts of Nashville, is a vocal election denier. Mr. Green is one of 34 Republican members of Congress who exchanged text messages with the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the far-right flank of the party sought nominal justification to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Even after the Jan. 6 riot, Mr. Green voted not to certify the 2020 presidential election. As Holly McCall, the editor in chief of the nonprofit news site the Tennessee Lookout, writes, such behavior from elected officials has “seeded our voting public with mistrust that continues to harm our democracy.”
But wrecking American democracy is not enough for the Dead Dog Party. Last fall Mr. Green flew to Brazil to do the same thing in that much more fragile democracy. In a trip paid for by the American Conservative Union, he met with Brazilian lawmakers pushing to change election laws. The meeting’s agenda: to discuss “voting integrity policies.” We know what happened next: Thanks in part to one of Nashville’s representatives in Congress, anti-democracy riots are now an American export.
Meanwhile, here at home, Mr. Green has just been named chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
The Republican Party under George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 over false allegations that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the September 11 attacks. Bush further claimed his goal was to plant and spread democracy across the Middle East, that it “must be a focus of American policy for decades to come.” Bush imagined a “global democratic revolution.” That pretense did not survive the occupation that spawned ISIS. It certainly did not survive the arrival of anti-democratic MAGA Republicanism roughly a decade later. That Republican Party now exports autocracy abroad and rebrands it as patriotism here at home.