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.)