5-24-2024 10:37am

From the Local Mayor of Alamogordo to the Supreme Court: It’s either their Republic, or no Republic at all.

In a special guest commentary from Jay Kuo he discusses three stories shaping our news this week have crystalized the stakes in this election: It’s either theirRepublic, or no Republic at all.

In this morning’s newsletter Letters from an American, Professor Heather Cox Richardson quotes Lincoln’s famous “A House Divided” speech in 1858. He spoke of “framed timbers” from “different workmen” building an edifice for slavery, not just as the law in the South, but for all of America.

The Confederates made a fateful decision: They would rather keep the immoral institution of slavery than remain in a slave-free Union. Two years later, the Civil War would begin.

Today, we again see framed timbers of different workmen, from the dictator wannabe ex-president, to the corrupt radicals on the Supreme Court, to the extremist MAGA legislators in Congress and state houses.

What edifice do they seek to erect? The evidence is now clear: They want a return to patriarchal white Christian rule, and to block our long journey toward a multi-racial, egalitarian, secular society.

Like the framers of the house of slavery, these new framers would rather have no democracy at all—with a president as an all-powerful king—than one where they must give up their power. Every regressive measure they have undertaken—ending abortion rights, gerrymandering and election denialism, just to name a few—are timbers for that frame.

Today, I want to highlight three new timbers that got nailed into place for the house the GOP is building. I’ll discuss the new abortion medication bill in Louisiana, the decision on racial gerrymandering from the Supreme Court, and the parade of GOP officials who simply refuse to commit in advance to accepting the 2024 election results. My hope is to show how these stories are all interconnected. They are boards nailed up in service of a larger blueprint for white, patriarchal, Christian Nationalist rule.

Louisiana restricts abortion medication

As reported by the New York Times, on Thursday the Louisiana legislature became the first to pass a bill outlawing the possession of popular abortion medications without a prescription. The anti-abortion GOP governor of the state is expected to sign it into law.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are medications used both in abortion services and in pregnancy health care, including the prevention of tumors and in the event of miscarriages. The new law classifies the drugs as “Schedule IV”—up there with Ambien, Valium and Xanax—and imposes fines and the possibility of jail time for illegal possession. Unlike these other Schedule IV drugs, however, these abortion medications are considered safe and are not addictive. The express purpose of the bill is to curb the illicit distribution of the medications for use in abortions.

This move is a continuation of an assault upon reproductive rights, which kicked into high gear with the Dobbs decision in June of 2022 overturning the constitutional right to an abortion and returning to the states the right to control women’s reproductive organs.

Women in Louisiana are running out of options to terminate their pregnancies. Most abortions are already banned in the state, with exceptions only when the mother’s life or health is at risk or a fetus has one of several fatal conditions. Travel to the nearest state permitting abortions is fast becoming cost-prohibitive, especially with Florida enacting a draconian six-week ban. And now, obtaining abortion medication for the purposes of terminating a pregnancy will become difficult to impossible under the law.

Louisiana may be the first state to pass this law, but it certainly will not be the last. Many red states are actively looking for ways to prevent women in-state from receiving out-of-state care, including to outlaw abortion medication mailed to them. And while, viewed narrowly, this is an attempt by the state to reduce illegal abortions, viewed in the context of our larger framework this is really about states limiting the bodily autonomy of a group of citizens while increasing the power of the state to police uteruses.

One thing this latest intrusion into the private lives of women establishes: The party that once championed small government is gone. In truth, that principle always came with an asterisk. The GOP doesn’t ever want a democratically-elected government policing and regulating their industries, rooting out their corruption, or limiting their power in any way. But when they control the government through anti-democratic means, there is ultimately no limit to what the government can do or permit to be done to the people—which is precisely how the Confederacy would have had it, too.

We should say it clearly. The GOP’s mantra was never really about small government. Theirs is fascism, masquerading as “representative” democracy.

The Supreme Court greenlights racial gerrymandering

From 1965 to 2012, for nearly sixty years, the United States made steady progress in voter enfranchisement, particularly for African Americans. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was enacted during the Civil Rights Era to dismantle the systems of gerrymandering and voter suppression that kept minorities from participating equally in our democracy.

A cornerstone of the VRA was to ensure that jurisdictions that had a long history of racial discrimination in their voting laws and rules would be subjected to additional scrutiny by the Justice Department or the federal courts. Under Section 5 of the VRA, any changes to the laws of these jurisdictions that affected voting procedures had to be “pre-cleared” before going into effect. This operated to prevent many Southern states in particular from enacting racially-based gerrymanders in order to dilute the votes of Black citizens.

The Roberts Court began to undo all this in 2013 in its infamous Shelby County decision. That opinion found that the VRA’s coverage of certain jurisdictions was out of date and therefore unconstitutional. The Court threw the issue back to Congress, knowing that political divisions there would mean no new jurisdictional coverage rule or formula would ever emerge. And sure enough, none has.

At the time, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg famously warned that to eliminate the preclearance requirement for these jurisdictions, on the grounds that the racism and voter suppression had somehow resolved over the decades, was to court disaster. “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Justice Ginsberg wrote.

Those words would prove prescient. After Shelby County, these same jurisdictions, freed of any oversight, moved aggressively to reimpose harsh new voter laws while redrawing district boundaries to limit Black representation. The latest example, which was the subject of the opinion issued yesterday by the High Court, was from South Carolina.

A lower federal court had held that South Carolina had illegally drawn its maps to create a racial gerrymander. Writing for the 6-3 majority, Justice Samuel Flag-flying Alito set up the very opposite of preclearance for these suspect jurisdictions, even while permitting partisan, party-driven map drawing to serve as a proxy for racism.

As Ian Millhiser of Vox observed,

In the past, legal restrictions on racialgerrymandering—maps drawn to minimize the voting power of a particular racial group, rather than the power of a political party—had the side effect of also limiting attempts to draw maps that benefitted one party or another. While the Court largely tolerated gerrymanders that were designed to lock one party into power, those maps sometimes failed because they also targeted racial minorities.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, however, is written explicitly to permit political parties to draw rigged maps, even when those maps maximize the power of white voters and minimize the power of voters of color. Indeed, Alito says that one of the purposes of his opinion is to prevent litigants from “repackag[ing] a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference.”

While in the past the Supreme Court has winced at the necessity and difficulty of adjudicating redistricting cases, Alexander is a full-throated endorsement of partisan gerrymandering. Alito writes in its opener that “as far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, a legislature may pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting.” If that means Black representation dramatically suffers, that’s just too bad.

“When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning conduct,’” Alito wrote, warning that “we should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.” In place of deference to the trial court’s factual findings, when it comes to cases alleging racial gerrymandering, there is now instead a presumption of white innocence: The new rule is that state legislators may now clutch their pearls and enjoy a “presumption of legislative good faith” whenever they are accused of such a thing.

In practical terms, it will be nearly impossible for any litigant to show that racism drove the map drawing, even if the result highly disfavors Black or Hispanic voters and representation. If the goal was to help Republicans gain political power as a party, and minorities suffer as a result, that is now constitutionally acceptable.

In short, the GOP may now use racist map drawing to hang on to power, and the federal courts must look away. Republican power will be equivalent, on the district maps themselves, to white power.

This is a devastating opinion in desperate need of a legislative fix. The solution lies in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would strengthen voter protections and reestablish preclearance under updated rules. But that bill is languishing in Congress, largely because of the Senate filibuster, which is another tool of minority rule that allows 41 percent of the Senate to block 100 percent of all non-budgetary legislation.

GOP leaders refuse to commit to accepting election results

There are many GOP hopefuls vying for the Vice Presidential nod from Donald Trump. They are making the rounds on the morning news shows and showing up at Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan to demonstrate their fealty and debase themselves on his behalf.

One crucial way to stay on 45’s good side is to continue to call the 2020 election into doubt and, more recently, to refuse to accept the 2024 election results unconditionally.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who once was outspoken in his criticism of Trump, now wants the VP job badly. Asked by Dana Bash of CNN about the 2024 election, Vance responded he would “totally plan” to accept the results if they were “free and fair.”

“If it’s a free and fair election, Dana, I think every Republican will enthusiastically accept the results,” said Vance. “And again, I think those results will show that Donald Trump has been elected president.” Vance added that parties should be able to “pursue” any “problems” with elections. “If you think there were problems, you have to be willing to pursue those problems and try to prosecute the case,” he urged.

Vance is setting up the argument, and a permission structure for other Republicans, to reject the 2024 results. That is, of course, unless Trump is the victor. Anything else, and Republicans intend to claim, once again and likely without a scintilla of evidence, that the election was rigged.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) sang a similar if even more extreme tune. Asked whether he would accept the results of the 2024, Sen. Scott responded that “at the end of the day, the 47th president will be Donald Trump.” Pressed on this for a yes or a no, will you accept the results, Scott said simply, “That is my statement.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also refused to answer a straightforward question about whether he would accept the election results, calling it a “ridiculous question” while dancing for six minutes under intense questioning from Kaitlin Collins. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), another VP hopeful, got the same question and yelled about Hillary Clinton instead. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) echoed Sen. Vance, saying he’d only accept the results if there’s “no massive cheating.” Ditto for Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), who warned of “no funny business”—as if electoral fraud in 2020 had ever actually been discovered and documented.

This “Donald Trump or no one” set-up by a range of GOP leaders is dangerous in the extreme. It disregards the idea, fundamental to any functioning democracy, that the losing side, meaning the ones with the fewer Electoral College votes, must concede. Republican leaders are instead openly stating that they do not intend to accept any result unfavorable to their party, paving the way for others to do the same, including at the county and state levels.

That of course is not a democracy. It’s a no-win situation for Democrats and a rejection of a fair and rules-based system. Deep down, the GOP knows that it is on the losing end of the popular vote and hanging on to an Electoral College advantage by a thread. Demographic changes, including more minority and younger voters as a percentage of the electorate, have made that advantage increasingly vulnerable.

The only way that the GOP can hope in the end to hang on to power is either to cheat through gerrymandering and voter suppression, or to reject the outcome of the election entirely. For this second part to work this time around, they need a Supreme Court willing to put its finger on the scales. The GOP must feel it is very nearly there, with two insurrectionist sympathizers now among the six conservatives.

A house divided and frail

Lincoln’s edifice of slavery is a useful and important reminder to look upon the house that the GOP is building today, and to recognize the timbers being used and which workmen are placing them. In response, we must build our own house on the hill, one secured upon a foundation of multi-racial pluralism and ordered liberty.

Our own timber comes from those who know, from long generations of struggle, how to build a future nation for their children, rather than simply tear one down so that others may not have or enjoy it. The GOP’s wood, by contrast, is rotten through. By its very nature, it cannot bear the weight and expectations of Americans to come.

A house divided cannot stand, but neither can one constructed from such inferior and corrupt material. Our obligation, in this year and in other cycles to come, is to reveal the GOP’s rot to our fellow citizens, so that they elect never to make such a house their home.

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