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Voters, Beware of Republicans Seeking Election [1]
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Date: 2022-09-03
From the early days of the Biden presidency until recently, it was a challenge to find any publication that didn’t predict the newly achieved Democrat majority in Congress would be short-lived; that Republicans would recapture control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections.
Regardless of how the midterm elections turn out, voters in November will face a challenge unprecedented in the history of our republic when they cast their ballots: Whether to vote to save our now endangered democracy by voting for Democrats or letting loose the forces of anti-democracy and autocracy by voting for Republicans, thus placing the nation’s fate in the hands of an explicitly illiberal party.
While very little of my junior high school Latin remains stuck in my mind, one phrase — suffragii cave (voters beware) — comes readily to mind as the nation prepares to vote in the 2022 midterm elections. This is what voters must remember if they vote for Republicans in November: This election will have consequences, not all of them good.
It is incomprehensible to me why any modern Democrat wants to be president following a Republican presidency. The multitude of problems passed on by Republican presidents leaves Democratic presidents at a substantial disadvantage as they begin their term in office. The transition from Trump to Biden underscores my point — from the economy to government policy incompetence (both foreign and domestic) to outright criminality, Trump’s presidency was a complete failure.
Yet, despite the challenging socio-economic, political, legal, and public health crises Biden inherited from Trump, not to mention the legislative disadvantages inherent in an evenly split Senate, Biden and the congressional Democrats have managed “to deliver…a series of legislative victories that will ripple across the country for decades — lowering the cost of prescription drugs, extending subsidies to help people pay for health insurance, reducing the deficit and investing more than $370 billion into climate and energy programs.” President Biden noted after signing the Inflation Reduction Act, “Democrats have managed to enact major legislative initiatives focused on bolstering the nation and its citizens’ future over special interests.”
Three recent pieces of legislation passed by Democrats support this conclusion:
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act dramatically increased federal investment in the nation’s “network of bridges and roads, airports, public transport, national broadband internet, as well as waterways and energy systems.”
The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan helped the country to “combat the ongoing COVID pandemic” while also dealing with child poverty and nutritional issues nationwide and assuring that upwards of 74 percent (approximately 249 million) of the US population received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine; and,
Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) The recently enacted multi-billion dollar(IRA) heralds the federal government’s most significant effort to “counter climate change and lower the cost of prescription drugs.” The IRA also empowers Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs.
And even before reaching the halfway mark of Biden’s presidency, Democrats also have enacted:
The CHIPS and Science Act “authorizes Department[s] of Commerce, Defense, and State activities to develop onshore domestic manufacturing of semiconductors critical to US competitiveness and national security.”
The Veterans Pact Act “expands VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.”
“makes various changes to federal firearms laws, including establishing new criminal offenses and expanding the types of weapons and devices subject to regulation.” The Protecting Our Kids Act (on gun control)
As Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) stated following the Senate’s passage of the IRA, “This culminates an incredible year of getting real things done for the people,” underscoring the amount of significant legislation Democrats have managed to pass as this Congress approaches its conclusion. As one CNN news program host noted, “It is much easier to be the opposition party…give the Democrats some grace. Governing is hard, especially when you have tiny margins.”
Meanwhile, several other major Democratic-led initiatives, ranging from voting rights (including the need to eliminate the filibuster to secure legislative protection of those rights) to abortion rights, remained stalled by an evenly split Senate and opposed almost en masse by Republicans.
Since the outset of Biden’s presidency, Republicans have lacked a viable legislative agenda to counter the Democratic majority’s (successful) legislative initiatives. But, while Republicans did not have a legislative agenda, they did have the makings of a plan to block the legislative efforts of Biden and the Democrats.
“One hundred percent of my focus is standing up to this administration. …What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the Biden administration is trying to do to this country,” Senate Minority Leader McConnell said.
Then (almost magically), in February of this year, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released its legislative plan for the 2022 midterm elections, which was deemed “…a game plan for activist government at its cruelest and most mindless, …a kind of haunted-house version of Newt Gingrich’s old Contract With America.”
Two decades earlier, following its review of Gingrich’s proposed “Contract With America,” American Prospect Magazine stated: “The long-term consequences, as revealed in the details of their [Republicans’] legislative package, are likely to be…insidious. Over time the new proposals would gut the nation’s safety net while creating a budgetary time bomb.”
And so will the NRSC’s prospective legislative strategy.
With no credible legislative strategy, Republicans set about to deploy McConnell’s blocking scheme. A review of Republican votes on the legislation passed by Democrats confirms McConnell’s statement about his party’s intentions.
Consider:
Republicans, by contrast, and despite holding majorities in both houses of Congress in the first two years of Trump’s presidency (2017-2018), enacted very few notable pieces of legislation. The first of which, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, provided the most sweeping revisions to the US tax system in more than thirty years. However, in a subsequent assessment of the tax cut’s impact, Forbes Magazine stated: “The independent Congressional Research Service…released a report showing the 2017 tax cuts for the richest Americans and corporations did not work. …Instead, the federal government incurred massive deficits while wealth inequality increased to its highest level in three decades.”
The other notable legislation that emerged from Trump’s first two years in office was Public Law 115-118, which amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 “to improve foreign intelligence collection and the safeguards, accountability, and oversight of acquisitions of foreign intelligence.” These FISA amendments, signed into law in January 2018, “increased punishments for those who mishandle classified information,” are now at the core of Trump’s current predicament generated by his removal of classified documents from the White House at the end of his presidency.
Concurrent to the party’s transformation under Trump’s leadership, Republicans’ cultism-cum-authoritarianism continues to play out at all levels of governance — federal, state, and local — and is interlaced.
At the federal level, Republican cultism (née “Trumpism”) focuses on the diminution of democratic and constitutional values and norms, the assertion of white supremacy, and the admiration of rule by a wealthy elite. Republicans also put the rights of business above those of workers, value the marginalization and destruction of trust in the media, and the rigging of elections while preventing minorities from voting, to mention a few of Trumpism’s more odious tenets.
Suppose Republicans regain control of the House of Representatives and or Senate. They will be able to protect Trump from being prosecuted for any of his sundry federal criminal liabilities related to the January 2021 Capitol Insurrection and his broader efforts to overturn the 2021 presidential election results, not to mention his recently alleged criminal liability in the current federal classified documents imbroglio.
And, if Republicans’ legislative output during the first two years of Trump’s presidency serves as an indicator, nothing positive is expected if they regain control of Congress. (Sorry, executive orders are not legislation.) A quick review of the NRSC’s legislative agenda suggests that Republican initiatives are likely to be laden with “culture war poison—straight, no chaser” rhetoric.
Voting rights? Forget them.
Abortion/reproductive rights? No chance.
Enhancement or expansion of the Affordable Care Act? Never.
Student debt reduction? No way.
At the state level, Trump’s Big Lie-election-denying supporters are running to be governors, secretaries of state, and attorneys general, seeking to become the “referees of our democracy”
— running elections, supervising vote counts, and certifying results. The States United Democracy Center notes, “As of July 28, more than half (60 percent) of the nation’s secretary of state contests include an Election Denier[;] more than one third (40 percent) of governor and attorney general races [had] an Election Denier candidate on the ballot.”
And as of May, the States United Democracy Center also points out that 33 state legislatures were considering 229 bills to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections. Fifty such bills have been enacted since the beginning of 2021. “The anti-democracy playbook is simple: If you change the rules of elections, and you change the referees who oversee elections, you can change the results.”
At the local level, election deniers are inspired by Steve Bannon’s “precinct strategy” and are signing up to be poll workers; they also are orchestrating harassment of current election officials. Targeted harassment by proponents of Bannon’s strategy has prompted a mass exodus of qualified election officials, making recruitment efforts especially important, according to a March survey by the Brennan Center for Justice.
As with Republicans’ unabashed embrace of authoritarianism at the federal level, Republicans at the state and local levels are more than happy to be the foot soldiers needed to toss democracy overboard — with no life jacket. By controlling the levers of government required to affirm election results, Republicans can (amongst other actions antithetical to democratic governance):
In effect, “It’s an overreach of power,” said the Georgia chapter of Common Cause executive director, “They’re definitely trying to do an upheaval of our election system.”
The public record confirms that Republicans willingly have allowed their party to be transformed into a “nationalist cult,” offering near-total obeisance to Donald Trump; they continue to demonstrate a willingness to purge any member(s) who oppose Trump. Consequently, following the defeat of Rep. Lynn Cheney (R-WY), the Lincoln Project noted that “Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is, in fact, an authoritarian nationalist cult, dedicated only to Donald Trump.”
Looking at Democrats’ accomplishments less than two years into Biden’s presidency, one hopes the progress continues and that Democrats’ willingness to work toward making America a more just and inclusive country prevails at the polls in November. It is impossible to believe that a Republican majority can match the constructive legislative output demonstrated by Democrats.
It is painful to look back and see how extensively a sycophantic Republican party exacerbated the dangers to America inherent in the unprecedented imperfections of Trump’s presidency.
Now, that same party, rebranded in Trump’s vision, seeks to be the majority party in Congress.
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