(Dobbs) Democracy Depressingly Diminished
The scariest part is, there seems little left to reverse it.
Facts, as we used to know them, died in the age of Donald Trump. Now, democracy is going the same way.
It fills me with fear. Or to quote the late writer Hunter Thompson, fear and loathing both.
It wasn’t just last night’s decisive Republican defeat of legislation to remove barriers and reinforce impartiality to the election process that filled me with fear and loathing. It also was a pair of stories that I’d seen earlier in the day— metaphors for the course of our country’s cascade.
One was about a rural county in the South— Lincoln County, Georgia, right up against the South Carolina border— that is becoming an emblematic embodiment of the erosion of American democracy, if not its end.
Lincoln County had seven polling places for the 2020 election. This November, if Republican officials carry out their plan, they’ll have one. One polling place in a county that covers more than 250 square miles. One polling place in a county that’s bigger than Chicago. Five times as big as San Francisco.
Naturally, this will affect Lincoln County’s poorest citizens. Translation: blacks. Translation: its most likely Democratic voters. Why? Because these are the voters who are least likely to have cars, least likely in this 250-square-mile county with minimal public transportation to have a way to get where they’ll have to go to vote.
Of course in this Republican-controlled constituency— I should say “Trump-controlled” because to the shame of old-fashioned Republicans, that’s what their Grand Old Party means today— they have ready explanations for slicing the system from seven polling places to one. In an egregious exhibition of insincerity, the chairman of the county commission told CNN, “We have some little, old, concrete block voting precincts that have been used for 40 years with no handicapped facilities at all. No real heat at all, no air-conditioning.” You might think he’s genuinely compassionate if you don’t remember that it’s his party that passed new election laws that make it illegal to give food or water to people waiting in long lines to vote. That is the counterfeit nature of his compassion.
And then, as if this were the pivotal point of Lincoln County’s plan, we are told that in the age of Covid, the old polling places also are impractical because they don’t allow for social distancing. As if instead, squeezing all the voters from seven polling precincts into just one will be safer?
Now multiply this by 19 states that have passed suppressive election laws like Georgia’s, with their own versions of Lincoln County. No wonder I fear for the future and loathe the people who might soon control it.
The other story yesterday morning came from my own state of Colorado, where two-thirds of the Republican members of the Colorado House voted Tuesday to formally thank a member of their ranks who led a delegation to Washington a year ago to be part of Trump’s inflammatory January 6th rally and then, along with the rest of the seditious mob, marched to the Capitol. This guy had the gall to tell his fellow lawmakers, “They were such nice people, Mr. Speaker. These people did nothing wrong. They were afraid for their country.”
“Such nice people,” who carried bricks and bats and attacked the police and called for the execution of elected leaders. And a majority of his party in the state legislature thanked him.
Just for good measure, these legislators from an alternate reality also moved to decertify Colorado’s 2020 results, as if the presidential election is still being litigated. In a small victory for sanity, they lost.
But still, you too should fear for the future and loathe the people who might soon control it.
Which brings us to last night. In the run-up to the decisive series of votes in the Senate, Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy said of the Democrats’ drive to re-exert some fair form of federal control over elections, “Every edge is sought, and every edge secured is exploited to keep your party in power.”
That is the pot calling the kettle black. Excuse the schoolyard taunt but Senator Cassidy, you guys started it. After an election certified as clean by courts and commissions from coast to coast— even the sham “Ninja” audit by Arizona’s Republican legislature turned up no significant irregularities— it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who started changing the rules and, in so doing, suppressing the means and diminishing the right to vote.
It’s worth reiterating that the Constitution does give Congress the power to undo injustice in state election laws. It is in the first clause of Article I, Section 4: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” (My italics.)
Congress, with the power of the majority in both houses, including Democratic senators who represent 40 million more Americans than their Republican counterparts, tried. But those minority Republicans, exploiting anachronistic rules that the Founders never even foresaw let alone mentioned in our foundational documents, beat every effort back.
If there’s still a path to fair elections, I sure don’t see it. What I see is tyranny of the minority, in the states, in the Capitol, in the country. What I see is a permanent advantage, however illegitimate, for forces that would regressively act against the public’s wishes on gun control and abortion rights and the separation of church and state. What I see is a party that has consistently garnered fewer votes nevertheless putting a stranglehold on democracy until, in the worst of scenarios, it can’t breathe any longer.
I fear for that future, and loathe the people who are turning our nation onto that path. They have sold their souls to the devil, but all of us will suffer the agony of his unholy heat.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his writing also appears on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.