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"Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice." [1]
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Date: 2025-01-12
The quote that comprises the diary title is from tonight’s Letter from an American by Heather Cox Richardson. She is talking specifically about North Carolina, where voters handed Democrats the state and Republicans are trying to hang on to it anyway.
In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from [Gov.] Stein and [AG] Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.
North Carolina Republicans have been particularly blatant in their determination not just to ignore the will of the voters, but to thumb their noses at the voters. They are rewriting the rules that they played by when they held executive power to make sure that the executive no longer has any power. One expects that if and when they take back the statewide offices, they will be sure to give that same power back to themselves.
This is totally contrary to the way a democracy works. The people decide who gets to wield power in their name, and one of the constraints on the party currently in power is that someday they will be out of power. They aren’t supposed to give themselves too much, because one of these days the other side will be wielding it.
That was the mistake the Republicans made under Bush II. They gave him lots of power, and then were disconcerted when Obama got to use it. With Trump back in office and the Republicans controlling all three branches — including a rouge rogue Supreme Court that delights in overturning precedent much the way a spoiled brat delights in overturning a table in nursery school — they are determined not to let power slip away again.
In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.
That time, it cost us a Civil War, 600,000 casualties, and the South prostrate for a century. And for all that blood and money, we didn’t do much to eliminate racism.
We are finally making some progress on racism, on equality overall, on women’s rights, minority rights, diversity. A clear majority of the country wants this and has said so at the ballot box. But the Republican party has been taken over by those who want exactly the opposite of what most of the country wants. And they know — they have known for decades — that they cannot get their way by persuading the country to agree. Now they see themselves in a position to force it on us.
That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment.
Richardson’s letter was about North Carolina specifically, but she means it as a warning for all America.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/1/12/2296639/--Republicans-refuse-to-accept-the-voters-choice
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