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   Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 04:26:14 JST Chuck Darwin

   The Republican Party is the biggest threat to American democracy today.
   It is a radical, obstructionist faction that has become hostile to the most basic democratic norm:
   that the other side should get to wield power when it wins elections.

   A few years ago, these statements may have sounded like partisan Democratic hyperbole.
   But in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and Trump’s acquittal in the Senate on the charge of inciting it,
   they seem more a plain description of where we’re at as a country.

   https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22274429/republicans-anti-democracy-13-charts

   • Embed this notice
     Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 04:37:18 JST Chuck Darwin

     in reply to

     All the reasons for the GOP’s turn against democracy
     — backlash to racial progress,
     rising partisanship,
     a powerful right-wing media sphere
     — remain in force after Trump.

     The leadership is still afraid of Trump and the anti-democratic MAGA movement he commands.

     More fundamentally, they are still committed to a political approach that can’t win in a majoritarian system,
     requiring the defense of the undemocratic status quo in institutions like the Senate and in state-level electoral rules.

     Republicans still control the bulk of statehouses and are gearing up for a new round of voter suppression bills and extreme gerrymandering in electorally vital states like Georgia and Texas.

     It’s very hard to see how any of this gets better.
     It’s very easy to see how it gets worse.

   • Embed this notice
     Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 04:37:19 JST Chuck Darwin

     in reply to

     The Trump presidency was a test of Republican attitudes toward democracy.
     Time and again, the president abused his authority in ways that would have been unthinkable under previous presidents.
     Time and again, members of Congress, state party leaders, right-wing media stars, and rank-and-file voters looked the other way
     — or even cheered him on.

     Two NBC polls taken about a year apart show that support for Trump’s first and second impeachment among Republicans remained exactly the same among Republicans:
     8 percent.

     Trump was impeached the first time because he tried to interfere with the integrity of the 2020 presidential election
     — attempting to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into opening up a bogus investigation into Joe Biden.
     Trump was impeached the second time because he ginned up a mob to attack the Capitol to disrupt the counting of the votes from the Electoral College.
     And yet in both cases, the percentage of Republicans who supported impeaching him was the same
     — a measly 8 percent.
     There’s just very little popular appetite in the GOP for punishing anti-democratic excesses by Trump, regardless of the circumstances.

     Elledeeay repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 04:37:20 JST Chuck Darwin

     in reply to

     Some of the most consequential Republican attacks on democracy happen at the state level

     A map from the Brennan Center for Justice shows every state that passed a restriction on the franchise between 2010 and 2019.
     These restrictions, ranging from voter ID laws to felon disenfranchisement, were generally passed by Republican majorities with the intent of hurting turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies.

     Republican state legislators were sometimes explicit about this:
     “Voter ID ... is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania,” then-state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai bragged during the 2012 presidential election cycle.

     Because Republicans dominated the 2010 midterm elections, Republican statehouses got to control the post-2010 census redistricting process at both the House and state legislative level,
     leading to extreme gerrymandering in Republican-controlled states unlike anything in Democratic ones.

     Conservative control of the Supreme Court enabled this state-level push.
     In 2013, the Court struck down the Voting Rights Act’s “preclearance” requirement
     — that states with a history of racial discrimination would be required to get permission from the Justice Department on their maps and other major changes to electoral law.
     In 2019, another Court ruling paved the way for further partisan gerrymandering.

   • Embed this notice
     Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Monday, 07-Oct-2024 04:37:20 JST Chuck Darwin

     in reply to

     The national Republican Party has broken functional government

     Today’s Senate, where you need 60 votes to get virtually anything done, is a historical anomaly.
     Its roots can be traced to the unyielding GOP opposition to President Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010,
     when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell turned the Senate into a dysfunctional body in which priority legislation was routinely subject to a filibuster.

     When Republicans won a Senate majority in 2014, McConnell found a new way to deny Obama victories:
     blocking his judicial appointments.
     These actions were an expression of an attitude popular among Republican voters and leaders alike:
     that Democrats can never be legitimate leaders, even if elected, and thus do not deserve to wield power.