Okay, so the “For the People” act did not overcome the filibuster this past week. That was no surprise, of course. Neither was the fact that Republican senators made no effort to specify exactly why they thought the provisions of the act would negatively affect Republicans. They speak in billboards, these people – short, snappy phrases like “power grab” and “stop the steal,” with no key as to what the hell they’re talking about.
But let’s be clear: in statehouses across the country, GOP legislatures and governors are putting the mechanisms in place to commandeer the next election, regardless of who gets the most votes. The “For the People” act would have rolled much of those back. Without some restraint from the Federal level, it’s going to be very difficult for poorer and disenfranchised people to access the ballot in coming elections.
Nothing new under the gun
Republicans have been working on this stuff for a long time. They’ve been pushing voter i.d. laws, rolling back early voting, and resisting policies like automatic voter registration for decades. During the Bush II administration, they even fired a bunch of U.S. Attorneys for not aggressively prosecuting voter fraud cases (which, frankly, were practically non-existent even then). The reason is simple: the more people vote, the more they tend to lose because their stated policies are so deeply unpopular.
Also, they have long tended to appeal to their constituents’ baser instincts – namely, fear of immigrants, fear and hatred of dark people more generally, fear of crime, etc. Democrats have resorted to this as well, but less so over time as white people have become a proportionately smaller part of the electorate. (Many of them do accommodate the views of their Republican colleagues, of course.)
GOP election strategy: one and done
There is, however, a difference in kind, not degree, about the current “conservative” movement. Now they truly seem determined not only to steal elections via legal and extralegal means, but to set themselves up so that they permanently remain in power. Trump is not what I would call a “thought leader” on the right, but he does have utter contempt for rules, restrictions, and institutions, and I think he deployed this to supercharge the autocratic tendencies in the Republican party, which now seems enamored with his erratic, dictatorial behavior.
Readers of this blog will know that I had my doubts last year over whether Trump would leave office if he lost the election. Based on what we know he and his cohorts attempted to do, I think that sentiment was justified. In all honesty, if Trump or some Trump clone runs for president in 2024, I think there’s a better than good chance that, with the support of these GOP legislators and governors, that candidate will be named the winner. And once they pull that off, staying permanently becomes that much easier.
Keith was kinda right
At the beginning of Trump’s term, Keith Olbermann put out a series of videos attacking him as a usurper, a criminal, and an autocrat. While I think the Russia, Russia, Russia stuff was way overblown, he was kind of right about Trump’s congeniality towards the idea of ruling like a freaking King Rat. I, for one, will not underestimate the danger of autocracy again, and I strongly suggest that you take the same precaution.
luv u,
jp
The fact that we so often find ourselves on the edge of disaster is an indication that we need to do something about not only this process of electing leaders, but also about the magnitude of power they wield in office. It is simply unacceptable that a single person should have the ability to make enormously consequential policy decisions and even blow up the world without having to consult with anyone else. The fact that an unstable, hyper-narcissistic creep like Trump can be elevated to such an office indicates a fatal flaw in our system. If we cannot raise the bar on who can be admitted to the presidency, we need to constrain the destructive power of the office by some means.
The most disconcerting part of this likely scenario is the prospect of living through one, maybe two terms of rule by either an egotistical man-child-billionaire or a corporatist Democrat. Of course, I far prefer the latter, mostly because there is some opportunity to push Clinton from the left, but either way we are likely to see a more bellicose stance towards issues of war and peace. Either way we will be moving to the right of Obama along certain political vectors. And Obama is not even a standard progressive; he is a centrist, and very cautious at that.
This is a media driven process. The horse-race coverage of the primary campaigns has pretty much swallowed up MSNBC, for instance. They basically pushed Melissa Harris-Perry out the door because she didn’t particularly want to be a campaign correspondent. Hard to blame her for that. Horse-race politics coverage is basically like sports journalism. The marketing approach is practically indistinguishable from that of sporting events – same kinds of music, graphics, etc. And this debate is a bit like Pacquio vs. Bradley. Except that it’s shrill white people.
With that out of the way, I am sure the imperial war machine party is looking for another tin car to drive around in. It’s quite possible that they would settle on Trump. Someone, after all, is going to populate his foreign policy establishment – thousands of them, keeping the gears of empire turning day by day. That’s kind of what makes him dangerous, though not so much as a Rubio or a Bush. It is also just conceivable that the neocons at least might begin to look favorably on a Clinton presidency. She is bellicose, obviously, and her differences with the Bill Kristol crowd on regime change are relatively minor. They might not overtly support her, but I could see them not vehemently opposing her if the alternative is Trump.
All that said, Obama’s natural inclination will be to offer an olive-branch appointment, something like the one he trial-ballooned this week, namely the Republican governor of Nevada. Seriously … what is it with this president’s Pangloss-like insistence on attempting to curry favor with the Republicans? Hasn’t he been burned enough times in the last seven years? He’s like freaking Charlie Brown trying to kick the football again. Earth to Obama: they hate everything you want to do … doesn’t matter what it is. Best to nominate someone that might energize the Democratic base for the upcoming election; make the point that the election is, in substantial measure, about this issue. It’s about a lot of things, but the Supreme Court is a biggie.
Capitalism’s Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 2008, and we are still living in the aftermath of that disaster. Yes, the government can point to select data points that indicated a modest level of recovery, but the fact remains that an economic system that has consistently failed the vast majority of the population over the past 30 years has entered into an entirely new phase of failure. Most working Americans are toiling at the only job they can find, earning an inadequate rate of compensation. Our major cities are choked with legions of homeless people. This system is broken; it only serves the top one percent. We need to take a hard look at this, sooner rather than later.
At least, that’s what’s left to us after a remarkably lackluster election in which about 37% of the American voting populace voted. That’s the lowest turnout since 1942, and it bears remembering that a lot of voting age men were in he military at the time. So if we can’t summon the will to vote, do we have the right to complain about the outcome? Sure, the Democratic party — including many of last Tuesday’s also-rans — is less than inspiring. But there is a small difference between the parties, and small differences can sometimes have an enormous impact on the nation’s most vulnerable. We owe it to them to go and mark the ballot, even if it means voting for some jerk-ass.
Post-election used to be a time to reflect on what happened, what was decided. There appears to be some of that going on, though probably not enough. Suffice to say that the predictions on the center-left were far more accurate than those on the popular right. It was more than a little cheering to see Karl Rove scrambling for data on Fox News after Ohio was called for Obama. This can’t be right! It would mean all of our assumptions are massively skewed! Welcome to the world of fact, fat boy. Couldn’t happen to a better guy. Wish I could be a fly on the wall the next time he speaks with Sheldon Adelson and some of the other rich wing-nuts who gave him millions of dollars to crush Obama, Sherrod Brown, and others.
It is often said that incumbency has its advantages, and it certainly does, but it has many drawbacks. One is that, as president, it’s harder to go around saying what you are going to do because the first thing people wonder is, well, why aren’t you doing it now? You are, in essence, applying for the job you already have. Your performance in that job is an actuality, not an abstraction. On the other hand, if you’re the challenger, you can promise anything, make any wild claim, run against mathematics itself, and act as though you have a big vat of miracle sauce locked up in your car elevator, and that once you take the oath of office, you’ll start ladling that stuff all over everything that’s bad and make it good.