Category Archives: Republicans

Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

Is democracy alive and well in the U.S. and unthreatened by a “bugnut insane” GOP?

Kevin Drum — indispensable blogger, over many years my favorite (though not someone whom I am “in basic agreement with on nearly everything,” nor do we think “the same way,” as he characterizes himself relative to Ezra Klein) — takes issue with a recent Klein observation that democracy in the United States is at great risk (and that the Supreme Court is central to that risk). Klein writes (in a passage that Drum quotes):

If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings, or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican Party.

. . . Supreme Court reform matters — for good or for ill — because democracy matters. In his recent book, The Great Democracy, Sitaraman makes an argument that’s come to sit at the core of my thinking, too: The fundamental fight in American politics right now is about whether we will become a true democracy. And not just a democracy in the thin, political definition we normally use — holding elections and ensuring access to the franchise. The fight is for a thicker form of a democracy, one that takes economic power seriously, that makes the construction of a certain kind of civic and political culture central to its aims.

Drum rejects the thesis that this is a time of special threat to democratic governance. He grants that the Republican Party has grown “more bugnut insane ever since the ascent of Newt Gingrich in the early 90s followed by the Mudochization of the news a few years later,” that right-wingers believe that “Democratic rule threatens to destroy America,” and that huge numbers of Republicans believe QAnon conspiracy tales. (So far, so good.)

He continues:

Wherever it comes from, it’s real. And it’s toxic. Needless to say, liberals aren’t trying to destroy America. But neither are conservatives, and our toxic partisan swamp just gets worse if liberals join conservatives in believing that the opposition party is ready to literally destroy the nation.

If Drum is right, the view that there is a grave threat to democracy posed by conservatives (or more precisely, by the Republican Party) is unfounded. I disagree. I believe Klein (and other small-d democrats, not simply liberals) have a much stronger case to make than Drum acknowledges.

In the passage Drum quotes, Klein presents no arguments for his conclusion, but other commentators have done so. Among the most comprehensive attempts to establish this threat is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. To oversimplify: The authors identify two norms essential for democratic governance — mutual toleration (accepting one’s political opponents as legitimate) and forbearance (showing restraint, rather than launching scorched-earth assaults); they argue at length, and with many contemporary and historical examples, that political parties and party leaders are key to preserving these norms, so that democracy stays strong; they observe that in recent years the Republican Party has repeatedly thrashed both these norms; and they conclude that, as a result of these violations (and other widely observed developments), American democratic institutions are under threat.

Perhaps because Drum doesn’t even allude to this argument, his scattershot objections fall flat. For instance: “Democrats controlled Congress for nearly 50 straight years after World War II and liberals didn’t think it was a threat to democracy.”

If Democratic majorities in Congress had been in place for decades, even though most voters had cast ballots for Republicans, then he might have a point. But that’s not what happened. Large majorities of Americans, district by district, cast votes for Democratic candidates. And that’s consistent with majority rule, hardly a violation of electoral or governing norms, and not a threat to democracy.

Several things have changed since the era of Democratic Congressional dominance: the parties aligned in ideological opposition to one another, with virtually no overlap; partisanship and negative polarization increased, while Americans came to adopt strong, thick identities on one side or the other of the divide; and one party – with a shrinking electoral base – veered off the rails.

The GOP has ceased to have confidence in its ability to attract voting majorities and has come to rely on gerrymandering (a much more devastatingly precise and effective tool than back in Governor Gerry’s Massachusetts), voter suppression (reminiscent of Jim Crow and equally shameful), and judicial intervention by hyperpartisan Republican judges and justices to forestall democratic accountability.

Party-line votes in the courts on issue after issue, including voting rights; legal arguments — in the courtroom, the classroom, and at think tanks — reminiscent of the Lochner Era; and the burgeoning successes of the conservative legal movement to win judicial rulings that dismantle Democratic legislation and administrative rules, all place the Supreme Court at the center of these democratic skirmishes (and provide context for Klein’s comments).

Republicans have resorted increasingly to constitutional hardball, delegitimizing their opponents and employing tactics hostile to principles and practices that nourish democracy, while Donald Trump — unique among his 44 predecessors — has run amuck. Far more disturbing than Trump’s behavior has been the response of Republican leaders in Washington and a number of state capitols: murmur objections (at most) to Trump’s tweets or comments, while doing whatever is necessary (when possible) to enable his transgressions, no matter what harm results.

In their account, Levitsky and Ziblatt identify troubling patterns of Republican behavior. Perhaps the story told in How Democracies Die is mistaken. Drum observes that “America has had gerrymandering, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court since the beginning.” He comments that “the foundation of democracy is that the people mostly get what they want most of the time.” But neither rhetorical point, nor his other objections, undermine the argument that Levitsky, Ziblatt, and other democrats make.

Drum doesn’t grapple with the observations, historical review, and arguments that undergird the democrats’ fears, so he doesn’t show how they have gone wrong. The points he makes are often contentious or lack relevance or both. Drum’s off-point commentary suggests that he may have failed to grasp what Klein and other democratic critics have tried to articulate.

In a second post on the same topic, Drum begins with this:

It should be possible to view something as appalling without also insisting that it portends the end of democracy. There are lots of appalling things going on today, but this doesn’t mean that democracy is withering on the vine.

No one could disagree with that, including the small-d democrats who embrace the view that the behavior of the contemporary Republican Party and its leadership threaten democratic institutions.

Drum’s apparent lack of understanding also surfaces in another passage from the final paragraphs of his first post, as he reflects on an earlier time, and — in effect — offers a shout-out to Democratic leaders of the past. If they could best the Republicans, he suggests, without adding seats to the Supreme Court or admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico to the Union, then 21st century Democrats should be able to replicate these successes:

Old school liberal pols like Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill would laugh at present day progressives who complain that the system is rigged against them just because we’ve lost control of the Senate for a few years and now face a potentially hostile Supreme Court. In no uncertain terms they would tell us to stop whining and instead do the hard work of winning more votes in more places. The Senate is what it is and everyone knows it. The rules are simple and well known, so go out and say things that will appeal to enough people in enough places to win 51 senators. We don’t need a couple of new states or a packed Supreme Court or any of that. We need to convince the American public that our agenda is the right one, and just running up the vote in California won’t do it—and isn’t perhaps the most democratic approach anyway.

In principle, this is straightforward. Progressives can make better arguments and eventually get most of the American public on our side. Alternatively, we can moderate our agenda to win more votes. Or some combination of the two. That’s the democratic way to victory.

While I’m cheered by this celebration of Democrats taking it to the Republicans — I was a fan of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and Tom Perez’s every zip code strategy; I believe Elizabeth Warren’s bread and butter agenda is vital for American families, whether they be Democratic or Republican — it only glancingly addresses the threat that has galvanized small-d democrats.

By the time It’s Even Worse Than It Looks appeared, numerous scholars had begun to draw attention to the transformation of the Republican Party from earlier eras — including the Reagan years — into something twisted and threatening. In 2012, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein described the Gingrich and post-Gingrich era GOP in these words:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

This represented a mutation. Today’s Republican Party is not your father’s (or uncle’s) GOP. Not Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill’s opposition party. Absolutely not the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. Yes, in previous eras, we had Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and paranoid activists in Kevin Drum’s Orange County. But they didn’t represent the leadership of the Republican Party. They were individuals on the party’s edge; they were outliers. The GOP itself was fit and healthy — and well within the mainstream: not an outlier and not a threat to democracy.

And things have gotten worse year by year. In an essay last month (in Ezra Klein’s Vox), “insurgent outlier” had become “authoritarian outlier.”

Although Drum has noticed that the GOP has become “more bugnut insane,” he hasn’t acknowledged the significance of the changes articulated by the small-d democrats. He still sees the same old political battlefield and the same old GOP (though nuttier). His approach insists, Nothing new here.

Drum has neglected a rigorously argued, well documented account that deserves to be taken seriously, as Ezra Klein does. In February 2018, when How Democracies Die came out, Klein wrote:

In most modern cases, “democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.” They rot from the inside, poisoned by leaders who “subvert the very process that brought them to power.” They are hollowed out, the trappings of democracy present long after the soul of the system is snuffed out.

… 

Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.

Kevin Drum hasn’t touched on anything resembling deep structure. His appeals to Rayburn and O’Neill fail to acknowledge that the Republican Party — and its leadership — have fundamentally changed since the bygone eras of Rayburn and O’Neill.

To appreciate this transformation, consider Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. They had a mutual respect for one another. O’Neill had watched the first challenger in nearly a half century — since FDR toppled Hoover — defeat a sitting president (with the exception of Carter’s victory over Ford, who had never before faced voters in a national election, not even as a candidate for vice president). Ronald Reagan (never mind the fanciful revisionism of pre-Trump Republicans) was an eminently pragmatic president (just as he had governed in California), willing to work with Democrats. He was the furthest thing from the Tea Partiers and Trump enablers — and from the unprincipled Mitch McConnell and his ilk.

It is not far-fetched to think that Reagan and O’Neill may have wished, since they worked together, for their counterpart to succeed — that they regarded this as far and away better than gridlock or dysfunction.

In the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans had competing agendas for governing. Both parties, on a par, put forward solutions to social problems for voters to assess. Republicans and Democrats campaigned, sought to turn out the vote, and abided by the results of elections. (Note that “. . . prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting.” That’s how recently Republican have cranked up their voter suppression strategy.)

When there was divided government — a Republican White House and a Democratic House of Representatives — the two sides came together to find common ground: that’s how they made progress, how they served the American public, how they regarded job number one.

Nancy Pelosi (as tough and savvy as Rayburn or O’Neill, by the way) would have worked well with Reagan (and with Republican majority leaders in the Senate, Howard Baker and Bob Dole). Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Chris Coons (two mainstream Democrats to help illustrate a point), neither of whom have recoiled at the idea of expanding the Supreme Court or admitting new states, are hardly shrinking from a fight with Republicans. Today’s Democratic leaders are made of the same stuff as those in the good old days.

What’s changed: Mitch McConnell (and the GOP caucuses in both the Senate and the House) often strategically opt for dysfunction, gridlock, and paralysis rather than cutting a deal, if they think they can shun accountability and win the next election — or the cycle or two after that. The Republican rejection of the two democratic norms — mutual toleration and forbearance — cripples the ability of the two sides to work together.

Donald Trump cheated contractors who worked for him. How many of those small business owners, after prolonged litigation and settlements for pennies on the dollar, would chose to work with him again?

Are Democrats in a position to trust the word and the enunciated principles of Mitch McConnell? Of Lindsey Graham? Or of any of the Republican Senators who follow their leader? How about Bill Barr or Brett Kavanaugh?

These folks aren’t backbenchers. They aren’t peripheral to the GOP. This is today’s Republican Party.

Newt Gingrich taught Republicans the words to vilify Democrats: sick, pathetic, traitors, radical … Republicans learned the lessons and Fox News Channel amplified the message. Now the insults (and lies — and they were always lies) are commonplace. That marked the end of mutual tolerance.

Gingrich, and the Republican leaders who followed, put an end to the second democratic norm as well: forbearance. McConnell’s Senate is the best current example of that. I won’t bother to list chapter and verse. There are examples aplenty. The federal bench, led by the Supreme Court, is well on its way to becoming the prime force to obliterate forbearance.

It’s a new day. If the Democratic and Republican parties embraced analogous, though competing goals, and recognized the same incentives in 2020 as they did from the ’50s through the ’80s, the present would be like the past (as Drum would have it).

But the Republican Party has figured out that they can generate dysfunctional government, so voters are frustrated and angry and gridlock reigns — and escape accountability (made possible because of negative polarization, opposing partisan identities, and FNC). They don’t have to try to make the system work. (Ronald Reagan, like Tip O’Neill, wanted the system to work.)

Republicans can erect barriers to voting, strive to disqualify votes cast, amplify their vilification of Democrats (and of Democratic constituencies — families who live in urban areas, people of color, immigrants from disfavored countries, and religious minorities) on cable television, radio, and the web, and still have a pretty good shot at reelection. And — best of all for the GOP — if they lose the Senate (as McConnell may do because of indifference to the toll from COVID and to economic havoc), he is confident that the GOP will win in another cycle or two, because there are only two parties to chose from. The pendulum will swing right again, especially since the GOP will do all it can to gum up the works when the Democrats seek to govern, to keep the anger and frustration amped up.

That wasn’t the Reagan agenda. Or the GOP’s. Not even close.

An off the rails Republican Party threatens democratic governance. Political scientists and other observers have made a strong case for this judgment. Kevin Drum’s appeals to previous eras of American politics, to past partisan skirmishes with wins and losses for each side, and to old school leadership fail to undermine this conclusion.

[Updated to correct misstatement: President Ford — who was appointed vice-president and took office after the president had resigned in disgrace — was defeated in 1976 while running for election for the first time.]

[Second update: In my first update, I tried to justify a contention in my initial post (expressed with a misstatement) that Reagan’s defeat of a sitting president was a singular political accomplishment. Jonathan Bernstein, with a better grasp of history than mine, noted subsequently that Carter was the only president in the 20th century “who was defeated in his party’s first term in the White House.” In my telling, the 1980 election revealed Reagan’s strength, while Bernstein points to Carter’s failure. In either case: Reagan’s victory suggested something rare in American politics, which Tip O’Neill was unlikely to overlook.]

(Image: The Spirit of ’76 from wikipedia.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Republicans

Legal principles be damned: Republican Justices smack down the Democratic Party and voting rights

Originalism? A close reading of the text of the Constitution? Strict respect for the law as written? Nonsense. Even Chief Justice John Roberts, who has made a career of disabling the Voting Rights Act, hasn’t been on board with the consistently pro-Republican Party, anti-voting rights’ series of grotesque rationales Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alioto, and Thomas have adopted in case after case after case.

Harry Litman in this morning’s Los Angeles Times, after Justice Kavanaugh cited Bush v. Gore as precedent:

The deciding principle of Bush vs. Gore is generally understood to be no more than this: George W. Bush wins. Or, to be as charitable as possible toward the five members of the court who made up the majority: The ruling was necessary to stop the partisan bloodletting and chaos generated by hanging chads in Florida.
The decision was so tenuous and rushed that the justices themselves, in a stunning departure from judicial practice, wrote into the unsigned opinion that it should not serve as a precedent: It was “limited only to the present circumstances.”
Nonetheless, Kavanaugh on Monday embraced the most far-fetched theory laid out in Bush vs. Gore, in a separate opinion written by Rehnquist, who was straining to figure out a way to insert the court into the Florida mess.

Next up in the stampede to indelibly brand SCOTUS as a tool of Republican voter suppression, Neil Gorsuch, who in a dissent trampled on precedent and federalism to overrule a state supreme court ruling on the state’s constitution and statutes, as described by Mark Joseph Stern in Slate:

Gorsuch’s approach here—going over state law with a fine-toothed comb to see if the state court got it right—is a stunning assault on state sovereignty. An oddly timed one, too: It is outrageous enough to reject an unbroken line of precedent that lets states run their own elections; it’s another thing to do so six days before Election Day. The Supreme Court’s ultraconservative faction appears bent on destabilizing this election. These justices are teeing up another Bush v. Gore if the presidential race comes down to Pennsylvania or North Carolina. They have laid the groundwork to nullify late-arriving ballots on the basis of a dangerous constitutional theory that even Chief Justice John Roberts finds too extreme.

Donald Trump will soon lose the popular vote to Joe Biden by a greater margin than he did to Hillary Clinton in 2016. If all the votes are counted, Donald Trump will lose the Electoral College to Joe Biden. The slender thread his reelection hangs on is the Republican Party’s campaign of voter suppression, which Trump and the GOP hope will lead to a victory via machinations in the courts or a state legislature (or two) or Congress — not one decided at the ballot box.

A resounding Biden victory with a decisive judgment rendered by American voters will not guarantee that Republicans cannot steal the election, but it’s our best bet at this stage. Judicial rulings to stop votes from being tallied — as with Bush v. Gore — is the last thing this country needs. One stolen election in two decades is more than enough.

(Image: Brett Kavanaugh September 27, 2018, vowing revenge on Democrats:

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions, from serving our country.

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.”)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

A perspective that clarifies the agenda of the contemporary Republican party

Ten days after the FBI broke up a domestic terrorist plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Donald Trump encouraged rally goers (shoulder to shoulder, without masks, cheering and jeering in the midst of rising rates of coronavirus infection and hospitalization) to chant, “Lock her up,” while adding himself: “Lock ’em all up.”

As we approach an election that will likely deliver an emphatic defeat to the President, two prominent Republican Senators, Ben Sasse and John Cornyn, offered criticism of their party’s leader, but no condemnation of either his campaign to delegitimize the election or his musings about jailing his political opponents (including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden). Washington Republicans refuse to acknowledge these expressions of an increasingly authoritarian chief executive as causes for concern.

Meanwhile, the United States Senate, controlled by a party dominated by a shrinking base — mostly white, mostly men, shrugging off the twin crises of a raging pandemic that is hardly slowing down and a struggling economy months or years away from full recovery, is rushing toward confirmation of a justice of the Supreme Court. Why the rush? Ronald Brownstein offers an analysis that puts the issue into context:

The historic number of Americans who stood in long lines to cast their ballot in cities from Atlanta to Houston symbolizes the diverse, urbanized Democratic coalition that will make it very difficult for the GOP to win majority support in elections through the 2020s. That hill will get only steeper as Millennials and Generation Z grow through the decade to become the largest generations in the electorate.

Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave. Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett—whom a slim majority of Republican senators appears determined to seat by Election Day—represent the capstone of that strategy. As the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity limits the GOP’s prospects, filling the courts with conservatives constitutes what the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz calls “the right-wing firewall” against a country evolving electorally away from the party.

Small-d democratic governance is antithetical to the success of the contemporary Republican Party. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are central tenets of the GOP’s electoral strategy, while the party has come to rely on the courts to stifle the aspirations of a burgeoning American majority. 

(Image of Donald Trump intoning, “Lock ’em all up,” from WZZM13 on YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

Senator Feinstein, living in the past, misses the big picture in GOP’s rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett

Hard to believe in October 2020, just over two weeks until election day, that a prominent Democratic senator — the ranking member, who has been in office for 28 years — is so clueless about the raw power play Republicans just made in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Dianne Feinstein had this to say to Chairman Lindsey Graham:

“This has been one of the best set of hearings that I have participated in. And I want to thank you for your fairness and the opportunity of going back and forth. It leaves one with a lot of hopes, a lot of questions, and even some ideas, perhaps some good bi-partisan legislation that we can put together to make this great country even better. So, thank you so much for your leadership.”

Earlier this week, I highlighted Josh Marshall’s injunction that it was foolish to embrace the pejorative language of ones opponents — especially when it creates a false narrative that “turns the entire reality of the situation on its head.”

Joe Biden hasn’t followed the injunction. I’m sure his advisors are unconcerned about their candidate’s words on what they regard (at least at this stage of the campaign) as a small-ball issue. The Biden campaign has been a smashing success with a candidate who has hardly strayed from strategic messaging on big picture issues.

In the context of the rush to confirm a conservative ideologue to replace Ruth Bader Ginzburg on the Supreme Court, however, Dianne Feinstein’s fulsome praise of Lindsey Graham — followed by a hug, without masks — is inexcusably damning.

In 2018, when Feinstein ran for reelection, two Democrats had finished first and second in the voting in California’s jungle primary, and so faced off in the general election. The California State Democratic Party endorsed Kevin de León, the former president pro tempore of the California State Senate, over the sitting U.S. Senator. De León also received my vote. Why?

In part (speaking for myself) because Dianne Feinstein was, and is, living in the past. She is an anachronism, out of sync with contemporary politics, and willfully blind to the unwavering commitment of her Republican colleagues to scorched earth opposition to all things Democratic. The refusal of the Republican majority to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland seems to have slipped her mind, while she willingly overlooks Republicans’ deceitful hypocrisy in doing a 180 with the Barrett nomination. (“I want to thank you for your fairness.”)

California’s senior senator recalls an era when Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch co-sponsored legislation and when John McCain and Joe Lieberman could form strong friendships — and often bipartisan agreements — across the aisle. She remembers an era when comity and senatorial courtesy were ascendant; a time, just a year before her election to the Senate, when committee chair Joe Biden could decide to preclude calling supporting witnesses for Anita Hill because he had made a pledge to a Republican colleague in the senate gym to hurry the proceedings along.

Those were the days. Whatever we think of them, though, those days are long gone. But Dianne Feinstein still clings to them.

This morning’s Los Angeles Times reports [emphasis added]: “Polls have shown that a majority of Americans believe the winner of the election should fill the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Meanwhile, Republicans prominently featured Feinstein’s comments and the hug with Graham in digital ads and news releases.“

(Image: Bloomberg on YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democrats, Republicans

The phrase “Court-packing” should not be in the vocabulary of any Democratic candidate

“I’m not a fan of court-packing, but I don’t want to get off on that whole issue,” Biden told CNN affiliate WKRC in Cincinatti. “I want to keep focused. The President would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would, in fact, pack the court or not pack the court.”

In this response, Joe Biden used the phrases “court-packing” and (twice) “pack the court.” In doing so, he accepted, wholly, unreservedly the Republican-frame of the question of whether Democrats — if they win the presidency and the Senate — should consider changing the number of Supreme Court justices.

While this is unlikely to have a measurable impact on the trajectory of his campaign, I regard this as an unforced error.

. . . I thought I would become apoplectic when I saw that some Democrats were referring to expanding the Supreme Court as “court packing” or tacitly accepting the use of the phrase when asked about it by reporters. Any Democrat who uses this phrase should be, metaphorically at least, hit over the head with a stick.

The simple fact is that “court packing” is a pejorative phrase. It is nonsensical to use it as a description of something you’re considering supporting or actively supporting. If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head. — Josh Marshall, the day before Biden made his comment

Although I don’t advocate hitting Biden over the head with a stick, I wish his team would have armed him with another response. The Biden campaign — like the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee on day one of the hearing — has maintained superb message discipline. They lost it in this instance.

Republicans don’t use the phrase “voter suppression” to describe their electoral strategy. Or “court-packing” to describe their packing the federal courts at all levels with Republican lawyers — often regardless of their qualifications, judicial experience, or temperament — whom they expect to be ideological and partisan jurists to rule consistently against Democratic constituencies, issues embraced by Democrats, and Democratic governors and legislators.

But, in addition to conveying the simple rule, Don’t use a pejorative expression flung at you by your political opponents, there’s a more basic issue at work (just beneath the surface). Josh Marshall followed the obvious point with an elaboration that reveals a more fundamental blunder [emphasis added]:

If you decide to support a certain politician you don’t refer to deciding to ‘carry their water.’ Someone who supports expanding the estate tax doesn’t call it the ‘death tax’. This is obvious. Doing so is an act of comical political negligence. But of course the error is far more than semantic. No one should be using this phrase because it is false and turns the entire reality of the situation on its head.

Republicans have pursued an extreme agenda through corrupt means to politicize the courts. That’s the issue staring us in the face (though not, in the midst of an election campaign that will culminate in three weeks’ time, an issue that Biden must address now).

The formula was and is simple: use every ounce of raw political power to stack the federal judiciary with conservative ideologues. Refuse to consider nominations; then rush them through. No nominations within a year of an election; but quickie confirmations within a month of an election. Republicans have taken the constitutional framework and abused it to the maximum extent possible to achieve this transcendent goal. While these are almost universally abuses, none are clearly illegal or unconstitutional. At the most generous they amount to using every tool that is not expressly illegal to maximize control of the federal judiciary.

The untimely death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the final weeks of an election Republicans seem likely to lose has cast the whole drama in clarifying light. Republicans are now on the cusp of securing a 6-3 conservative High Court majority which will act as an effective veto on Democratic legislation using arguments no less facially absurd than the list used to attack Obamacare.

This is all the work of decades. But it is particularly the work of the last decade, 2010 to 2020. And it is all guaranteed, locked in, final on the assumption that Democrats will not even consider much milder and expressly constitutional remedies to repair the damage wrought by Republican judicial corruption. Indeed, conservatives are now reacting with something like apoplexy at the idea all this work, wrecking half the government in the process, could be voided with a simple majority vote to expand the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court. The Republican program is raw power for me, norms and prudence for you. Few things show how much Washington DC remains wired for Republican power than the idea that anyone can with a straight face call the possibility of Democrats taking some remedial action “court packing.”

Joe Biden, take notice.

(Image: Amy Comey Barrett makes her opening statement on day one via PBS/YouTube.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An increasingly authoritarian GOP has a plan to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump

President Donald Trump on the November 2020 election:

● “The only way we’re gonna lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. The only way we’re gonna lose this election. So we have to be very careful.”

● “So this is a disaster waiting to happen. The only hope we have, really, other than going through a long unbelievable litigation at the end after it’s over, is we’re gonna win. We’re not going to lose this except if they cheat. That’s the way I look at it.

We can’t let ’em cheat. We can’t let ’em. . . .Our country is at stake . . . Our country is at stake, because these people will destroy our country. We can’t let this happen. And this is a scam. They know it, the media knows it, but the media doesn’t wanna cover it. They know exactly what’s going to happen and so do I. But the Democrats know better than all of us what’s gonna happen.”

● “We’re gonna have a victory on November 3rd the likes of which you’ve never seen. Now we’re counting on the federal court system to make it so we can actually have an evening where we know who wins, okay? Not where the votes are gonna be counted a week later, or two weeks later. . . .”

[Q: Win, lose, or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?]

● “Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster. . . .

We wanna have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans — you’ll have a very peaceful — There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation. The ballots out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The relentless campaign to deny the integrity of the upcoming election is part of a larger Republican plan, set out in plain sight, to throw the election to Donald Trump.

In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe the informal rules or norms that serve as the guardrails of our democracy, forestalling a democratic breakdown  – and a Republican Party more than willing to plow through those guardrails to gain political advantage. As the authors explain, “political leaders, and especially political parties,” play the critical roles in preserving democracy. The GOP has shunned this role.

Nearly two decades after the ascendency of Newt Gingrich, after Bush v. Gore, and half a dozen years after publication of Mann and Ornstein’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, no political observer in 2018 (when How Democracies Die was published) could have been surprised by the indictment of the pre-Trump GOP, and not simply of the party since Trump’s takeover.

The book, which I read in early 2019, is a warning to small-d democrats. I regarded the warning as less urgent, and the threat as less imminent, on that first reading than I do now. I recognized then that the Republican Party continued to trash democratic norms and that Trump had pushed the GOP even further off the rails, but I believed that our institutions would protect us. We were safe from the worst. We would vote Trump out of office, just as we had rejected the Republican majority in the House in November 2018.

But the Republican Party has become increasingly extreme with each year of the Trump presidency. So, the passages that I regarded as perceptive observations have become alarming portents. As our country loses prestige and influence abroad, and as the chaos at home betrays our image as the world’s greatest democracy, our democratic institutions appear less robust than they did even a short time ago.

Shockingly, today the United States of America doesn’t seem a world away from Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary (to cite a few of the countries discussed in How Democracies Die where people still cast ballots, but authoritarians rule). The threat of a free and fair election — offering a judgment on Donald Trump’s presidency — being subverted so Trump can stay in office regardless of the will of American voters is right upon us, here and now in 2020.

Recognition of this impending threat has come in stages.

On August 19, election-law expert Richard Hasen wrote about the broad Republican strategy:

The threat to the 2020 election’s legitimacy finally broke through into everyday conversation last week. People who pay little attention to politics started talking about whether President Trump was looking to mess with the United States Postal Service to slow down the receipt of mail-in ballots.

After reports from NPR and the Washington Post (on August 22 and 23, respectively) that upwards of 500,000 mail-in ballots had been disqualified in the Wisconsin primary jolted me, on August 24 I posted, “Democrats desperately need a Plan B.” If a half million votes could be lost in a single primary, maximal Republican interference in multiple states in a general election could be much more consequential. The GOP is preparing to pull out all the stops to prevent votes from being counted (the successful strategy in Florida in 2000), so Trump doesn’t face a reckoning.

By September 10, when Ronald Brownstein wrote the essay, “Democrats Won’t Cede the Streets This Time,” the previously fantastical idea (an authoritarian leader subverting a free and fair election in the U.S.A.) was widely anticipated. Not only did Democrats expect Trump to try to steal the election, they expected Republicans to employ shock troops (as they had in the well-orchestrated Brooks Brothers’ riot of 2000) to intimidate officials responsible for tabulating votes.

Hasen’s assessment now is that the Republican Party’s plan — to muck up the works and then, when bedlam breaks out, disregard the voters and declare Trump the winner — is “a five-alarm fire” that threatens democratic rule:

With less than six weeks to go before Election Day, and with over 250 COVID-related election lawsuits filed across 45 states, the litigation strategy of the Trump campaign and its allies has become clear: try to block the expansion of mail-in balloting whenever possible and, in a few key states, create enough chaos in the system and legal and political uncertainty in the results that the Supreme Court, Congress, or Republican legislatures can throw the election to Trump if the outcome is at all close or in doubt. It’s a Hail Mary, but in a close enough election, we cannot count the possibility out. I’ve never been more worried about American democracy than I am right now.

I initially shrugged off Trump’s attacks on the credibility of the election because he had done the same thing in 2016 — even after winning (when he claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal votes had been cast, unfairly depriving him of a popular vote victory). I regarded the continuing crusade as just blather and bluster. (And it would be were it not for the complicity of the Republican Party and its leadership.)

I shrugged off Trump’s tweets about postponing the November 3 election, which I took as evidence of his insecurity (after consistently trailing Joe Biden in public polling for more than a year) and his ignorance (of the structure of our governing institutions). Moving the date of the election was not a viable possibility — and so not the way to steal an election.

I never regarded as likely the suggestion that Trump would lose the election, but refuse to budge from the White House.  That’s not where the threat lies, as Barton Gellman explains:

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

The linchpin: “if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them.” Trump is Trump. He sends signals. It is his Republican allies — in Congress, on Fox News Channel, in a handful of legislatures and statehouses across the country, and at the Supreme Court — that could pull off the heist.

The Republican Party has moved unwaveringly toward a fulsome embrace of Trump’s authoritarian impulses. At every fork in the road — whether to enable Trump’s authoritarian incursions or to take a principled stand to defend democratic institutions — Republicans in the House and the Senate have chosen the former.

Consider 2020; that is, just the past nine months:

Apart from Mitt Romney (who acknowledges that he has no followers in today’s GOP), Republicans in both the House and the Senate were unanimous in refusing to hold Donald Trump accountable for his shakedown of Ukraine’s President Zelensky. This was a choice. The rejection of principle, in favor of raw political power, with the recent Supreme Court vacancy was a choice. The loudest voices among Washington Republicans have reinforced Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election; other Republicans remain silent (implicitly standing behind Trump). Everyone — the vocal and the mute — has made a choice. Finally, the namby-pamby statements after Trump’s rejection of the principle of a peaceful transition represent a choice. (Not that a more definitive rejection from today’s Republicans, while still weeks away from the election, would count for much.)

The Republican Party has rejected Congressional oversight, Constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, the sanctity of the vote and of democratic elections, conservative principles and policy commitments, and much else where this president is concerned. The party has collectively made choice after choice to go all-in with Trump wherever he has led.

In my August 24 post, I raised this question:

But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

I would not have thought to write those paragraphs at the beginning of the year, much less in early 2019, after first reading How Democracies Die. Even understanding that the GOP was an insurgent outlier, which employed voter suppression as a primary electoral strategy, I would have regarded this contingency as a bridge too far. But here we are.

I’ve written more than once about the go-to play in the Republican Party’s game plan, which Steve Bannon described as “to flood the zone with shit.” Republicans in Washington and state capitals, on FNC and talk radio, in social media and on the streets are always prepared to flood the zone with shit. Lies, conspiracy theories, denials, misdirection, and ceaseless vilification: that’s the route to creating chaos. Republicans are amply prepared to follow their authoritarian leader if, when push to comes to shove, they think they can get away with it.

Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s term, Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote:

We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share . . . . An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.

Once a would-be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and renewing the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.

Thus far, choice by choice, the Republican Party has failed both critical tests.

The authoritarian threat — as the country’s November election approaches — is nearer, more imminent than I had imagined just months ago. Killing democratic rule is not just an exotic foreign affair, it’s something that could happen here. The contemporary Republican Party has a plan for stealing the 2020 American election — if only a viable opportunity presents itself. It is up to democrats (and Democrats) to make sure that tabulated ballots, not chaos and chicanery triumph.

(Image: The Hill.)

Blue State Blues, Donald Trump, Republicans

We failed to act on warnings of climate change in the 1980s — yet the GOP is in denial in 2020

From Sunday’s Los Angeles Times:

In 2001, a team of international scientists projected that during the next 100 years, the planet’s inhabitants would witness higher maximum temperatures, more hot days and heat waves, an increase in the risk of forest fires and “substantially degraded air quality” in large metropolitan areas as a result of climate change.

In just the past month, nearly two decades after the third United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was issued, heat records were busted across California, more than 3 million acres of land burned, and in major metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, air pollution has skyrocketed. — “California’s climate apocalypse,” by Susanne Rust and Tony Barboza

The warnings actually came much earlier, as the story notes:

As one 1988 internal Shell Oil Co. document noted, “by the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even to stabilize the situation.”

“I’m only sorry that in 1989, I could not get an audience for what I wanted to communicate,” said Jim Hansen, a retired NASA researcher and early climate change scientist, of testimony he made to Congress about the issue.

The Western United States is burning. We did too little, too late to avoid catastrophe. Yet, as we near the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the President of the United States is a climate change denier, as this exchange between POTUS and Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary of Natural Resources, shows:

THE PRESIDENT: … So, Wade and Thom, please.

MR. CROWFOOT:  Yeah, well, from our perspective, there is amazing partnership on the ground, and there needs to be.  As the governor said, we’ve had temperatures explode this summer.  You may have learned that we broke a world record in the Death Valley: 130 degrees.  But even in Greater LA: 120-plus degrees.  And we’re seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer but also our winters warmer as well.

So I think one area of mutual agreement and priority is vegetation management, but I think we want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests, and actually work together with that science; that science is going to be key.  Because if we — if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.

THE PRESIDENT:  Okay.  It’ll start getting cooler.

MR. CROWFOOT:  I wish —

THE PRESIDENT:  You just watch.

MR. CROWFOOT:  I wish science agreed with you.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, I don’t think science knows, actually.

 Thom …

Yet it’s not just the President. He has, with the collaboration of the contemporary Republican Party, systematically forced out or silenced scientists in government. Most recently, he hired a climate change denier for a top role in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as Hurricane Sally heads into the Gulf Coast states.

Add to this that at a time of a raging pandemic that has killed more than 194,000 Americans — and still counting, Trump has undermined the scientists at the CDC.

Listen in vain for objections from GOP leaders in the House or the Senate. Fifty days until November 3.

2020 General Election, Republicans, Short & Sweet ... Short & Sour

In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida: 24 hours of efforts to rig election for Trump and the GOP

No act is too brazen for the Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. [Update: In a surprise,“the court’s newest conservative-backed member, Justice Brian Hagedorn,” shunning a party line vote, formed a majority with liberals to rule against mucking up the works.] Things didn’t turn out so well during the primary (apparently many Wisconsin voters resent the imposition of minority rule in the state). We’ll see if the latest attempt to throw a wrench into the works is a winning play by the Republicans.

Meanwhile, a federal appeals court considers whether North Carolina’s recent history of discriminatory voting restrictions, which were found to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” should be considered in evaluating whether another law — with the same target — should be invalidated (“Court examines North Carolina’s new law that requires photo IDs for voting”).

While in another appeals court, a 6-4 majority found that Florida’s 21st century version of the poll tax passes constitutional muster (“Florida can bar ex-felons from voting if they owe court payments, appeals court rules”).

Donald Trump, Republicans

Why the Republican base isn’t budging from Donald Trump — no matter what havoc he creates

“To understand the corruption, chaos, and general insanity that is continuing to engulf the Trump campaign and much of the Republican Party right now, it helps to understand the predicate embraced by many Trump supporters: If Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidency, America dies.” – Peter Wehner

As Mike Pence put it at the RNC: “It’s not so much whether America will be more conservative or more liberal, more Republican or more Democrat. The choice in this election is whether America remains America.”

Joe Biden (and any other Democrat who might have been nominated), Democrats/liberals, and the broad, diverse coalition the Democratic Party represents – all pose an existential threat to the United States of America in the minds of the Trump base. Opposing the Democrats is the raison d’être of the Republican Party and the glue that sticks Trump’s base to Trump.

When asked what the contemporary Republican Party stands for, a senior GOP aid replied:

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media. That’s what we believe in now.” – Brendan Buck

David French, former National Review writer, quotes Buck and then adds [emphasis added]:

I can boil it down into three words—“fighting the left.”

You don’t need a platform to accomplish that goal. You don’t even need to succeed in governing the nation. Your pandemic response can fail. You can watch cities start to burn. Unemployment can soar. But behind it all is a bedrock animosity so strong that any success (such as the excellent diplomatic achievement of an Israeli/United Arab Emirates peace deal) is something your opponent could not possibly achieve and any failure would be orders of magnitude worse under an opposing regime. 

And note how these beliefs are fundamentally unfalsifiable. How can you “prove” a Democrat would have achieved the same success as a Republican? How can you “prove” that their failures would have been worse?

Negative polarization is utterly futile and destructive as a governing philosophy.

Wehner writes [emphasis added]:

I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be.

Consider Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, a spectacular failure as illustrated by comparing the U.S. (which leads the world in cases and deaths, and where COVID-19 is still out of control) with other countries confronting the pandemic:

Chart from Johns Hopkins.

Yet any erosion of support among Trump’s base has been barely detectable:

Chart from Five Thirty Eight.

“Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Seen through the prism of a worldview embraced by Congressional Republicans and Fox News Channel, the possibility of a Democrat in the White House threatens the very fabric of America. The base accepts Trump at his word when he says, “… I alone can fix it,” whatever it may be — all evidence to the contrary.

That’s a consequence of negative partisanship (which FNC and the conservative media universe create and sustain). That’s owning the libs and defying the reality-based news media.

But that’s not all that’s going on here. The white folks who embrace Trump most tightly would also appear to fear a democracy in which increasing numbers of people of color, especially Black people; Muslims and other people of faith, apart from Christians ; and dark-skinned immigrants all have a say in governing our nation.

I’ll explore that issue and white identity politics in a future post.

(Image: PBS NewsHour.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

There is much reason to doubt that the November election will be free and fair – At least we’re forewarned

Democrats desperately need a Plan B.

Plan A is encouraging voters to send in ballots by mail. That seems foolhardy, since Republican lawyers will be in place in key states across the country to challenge votes, delay the process, and hope for another result like Bush v. Gore delivered in 2000 to stop counting votes — or to muddy the process so much that one or more Republican controlled state legislatures throw all their electoral votes to Trump (as the majority in Bush v. Gore asserted that the Constitution sanctioned)*.

The headline in the photo above is from the Washington Post. NPR beat the newspaper to the punch, with a similar headline (and story) yesterday: “More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016.”

Two days ago an op-ed in the Post (“I mailed my ballot in on time. Florida tossed it. 2020 will be much worse.”) included this chronology:

In 2018, I mailed my ballot on Oct. 29, eight days before Election Day. Yet every time I checked the website of the Miami-Dade County Elections Department in the following week, I got bad news: “Ballot not tabulated.” Maybe the system was backed up, I thought. I called the office on Nov. 7, the day after the vote, but the woman on the other end of the line said my ballot still hadn’t arrived. No way would it be counted. 

Ten days later, I received scanned copies of each side of my ballot envelope. On one side, there was a Nov. 9 postmark. On the other, the Nov. 14 arrival date. My ballot had spent half a month traveling 10 miles across town. And I was in good company: 3,429 other people in Miami-Dade had sent ballots that were deemed late and thus not tallied, according to the late-ballot log I obtained from the Elections Department. Of those, 2,105 had postmarks on or before Election Day. One was postmarked Oct. 17. Statewide, county supervisors discarded more than 15,000 ballots for lateness, as required by Florida law.

Trump can’t win the election unless something unforeseen and dramatic happens between now and November 3 that somehow turns things in his favor. (Not likely.) But his chances of stealing the election — in plain sight as we all watch — are better than we might have anticipated a relatively short time ago.

Republicans can’t be counted on to side with democracy if a victory in the presidential election hangs in the balance (or if a Republican majority in the Senate is in play). Yes, Republicans in Congress pushed back on Trump’s suggestion that we postpone the fall election. But — stop and consider for just a moment all that we’ve witnessed over the past three and a half years — are there any grounds to believe that, say, Mitch McConnell would object to a transparent theft of the election if he thought that he could get away with it?

Consider all of Trump’s enablers. Isn’t the same cynical calculation in play for each of them? If Fox News Channel and the rest of the conservative media universe were on board, nearly half the country would be convinced, if Trump claimed a victory, that Trump had won (or that McConnell had held his majority).

Democrats had better come up with an alternative to Plan A, because that’s a slender reed to hang our fortunes on. We need more than that to protect majority rule. We can’t count on democratic norms; or the rule of law; or legitimate, non-partisan rulings from the courts. Bipartisan consensus on all that stuff is long past.

We can’t count on the timely, reliable delivery of mail; or competent, conscientious county officials tallying votes; or innumerable workaday procedures not to glitch out and effect the outcome. Most of the 550,000 uncounted primary votes — and the delayed and uncounted ballot mailed in by the op-ed writer — are just kinks in the system, not likely the result of bad faith. But in anything resembling a close election, glitches and kinks could determine the outcome. Let’s add Republican bad faith to the mix, because we have that aplenty.

If Republicans decide that half the country (or close enough) is with them, they will not hesitate to muck things up so badly that an outright theft becomes possible. Tweets. On-air rants. Legal challenges. Organized outrage. Manufactured chaos. All in the service of stealing an election (as they hurl that accusation at Democrats).

Republicans with reservations will stay silent. The shouters will have the floor — until it’s time to claim the victory. Then they’ll all accept whatever they’ve managed to pull off.

It would be much uglier than 2000, but that won’t stop them. Ugly works for them.

* “In its infamous 2000 decision in Bush vs. Gore, the U.S. Supreme Court remarked that although every state legislature had given voters the power to vote directly for the president and to allocate the state’s electoral college votes, state legislators could take back that power at any time.“