December 7, 2018
All this week, the news media has been consumed with the pomp and ceremony of the state funeral for George H.W. Bush, justly mocking Trump for standing silent and stone-faced, while every other living President stood and recited the Apostle’s Creed; or mawkishly celebrating W’s candy hand-off to Michelle Obama, as if his adorable crush could erase eight years of his disastrous presidency. Meanwhile, in a series of “below the fold” stories, Republicans around the country have been taking shocking, unprecedented steps to override the will of the voters and arrogate power for themselves. North Carolina Republicans, who pioneered the tactics currently on display in Wisconsin and Michigan, have taken the coup one step further with the apparent outright theft of the 9th Congressional District through brazen election fraud.
Each instance is truly astonishing in its own right. Wisconsin has been a laboratory in how to hijack a progressive state through a toxic, anti-democratic cocktail of voter suppression and extreme gerrymandering. The partisan gerrymandering was so extreme that it was invalidated by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, who ordered the state to redraw the districts. The Supreme Court vacated the decision on procedural grounds earlier this year, leaving the gerrymandered districts in place for the 2018 midterms (Source: Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ____ (2018). As a result, Wisconsin Republicans won 64% of the legislative seats, despite winning only 45% of the vote (Source: “Republicans’ power grab in Wisconsin is more evidence the party doesn’t care about the will of the voters,” by Emily Mills, Think, nbcnews.com, 12/4/18).
However, since statewide offices cannot be gerrymandered, Democrats won the Wisconsin races for governor and attorney general. Republicans responded by rushing through a raft of extreme bills that attempt to strip power from the Governor and Attorney General before they even take office. Among the changes were measures giving the legislators the ability to hire private lawyers to replace the Attorney General in litigation challenging the constitutionality of various statutes and prohibiting the Attorney General from withdrawing from the action challenging the Affordable Care Act; stripping the Governor of the authority to appoint members of the state’s economic development board or to ban guns from the state capitol (Source: “Lawmakers Clash and Protestors Chant Amid Fight Over Wisconsin Governor’s Power,” by Mitch Smith and Monica Davey, The New York Times, 12/4/18). In Michigan, the lame duck Republican legislators introduced bills to scale back paid sick leave and postpone a minimum wage hike. These moves are nothing short of a coup, in which Republican elected officials are thwarting the will of the voters in ways that will directly harm those voters.
The most alarming instance of the Republican contempt for democracy comes out of North Carolina. It is increasingly clear that Republican Mark Harris won his slender 905 vote victory through blatant election fraud (Source: “ EXCLUSIVE: Absentee ballot envelopes in North Carolina fit into “a pattern of fraud,” by Judd Legum, PopularInfo.com, 12/3/18). Even more stunning is the fact that the operative at the center of the fraud, convicted felon, Leslie McCrae Dowless, has apparently been doing this in elections going back eight years (Source: “The man at the center of fraud probe in North Carolina may have been doing this for eight years,” by Phillip Bump, The Washington Post, 12/5/18).
As this entire scandal has unfolded, Congressional Republicans, the supposed stewards of “election integrity,” have been oddly silent. Of course, we have known all along that their cries of “voter fraud” were simply a ploy to fearmonger the public into legalizing voter suppression. The tragic mistake that far too many Democrats made, was to ignore the Black grass roots activists and voting rights lawyers, who have been saying for years that rampant voter suppression was not just a threat to Black people, but an existential threat to democracy. The truth is, Black people are always the canaries in the coal mine. What is happening in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina is proof. Whatever you let them do to us, they will eventually do to you.