At the rate it’s going, if the Republican Party has its way, we’re going to end up less as a strong nation with common norms and more as just a bunch of states going their own way. We won’t be a single nation of collective laws, we’ll be a swarm of states with their own laws. That’s because it’s not the Republican Party anymore, it’s the MAGA Party. They are extremists. They’re not looking to make America great again. They’re looking to break it up, banish the dissidents, burn the pieces, and bury the ashes.
An exaggeration? Yes, for the moment. But as other nations have learned to their peril, the dilution of a democracy has to start somewhere. You might have noticed over the past few years that some of the leading lights of the MAGA movement have had more praise for political leaders who have diluted their own democracies than for those who have fought to preserve them.
Here at home, MAGA has assaulted our tried-and-true traditions for years now, and four things have happened this month that take us farther down that slippery slope. Disrespect in Alabama for a Supreme Court decision about voting rights, contempt in Texas for federal and international law, the reactions of the MAGA minions to the indictment against ex-President Trump for conspiring to conceal national security documents and obstructing justice, which became even more damning yesterday, and unproven allegations against President Biden that have given rise to talk of impeachment.
First, Alabama. More than a quarter of the state’s population is black. More than a third of its people are Democrats. And yet the way Alabama’s voting districts were carved up, Representative Terri Sewell is the only black and the only Democrat among Alabama’s nine members of Congress.
A three-judge federal court— with two of its judges Trump appointees— saw something wrong with that, unanimously ruling last year that Alabama’s congressional delegation might be in violation of the Voting Rights Act because the way it got elected, blacks have “less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.”
Alabama protested, but even the conservative United States Supreme Court agreed with the lower court— Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the Court’s three liberals— and ordered Alabama to redraw the maps. The Court’s stated goal was to create a second district where blacks are either a majority, or at least close.
Alabama’s response? A defiant “No!” What the MAGA-dominated state legislature did instead was redraw Representative Sewell’s district to reduce its black population by about 5%, and added them to a second district where they will constitute 40%. That is not what the Supreme Court ordered.
But Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey all but told the Court to take a hike. She said in a statement, “The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups.”
Isn’t that pretty much what they used to say about slavery? Isn’t that what Ivey’s long-ago predecessor, Governor George Wallace, used to say about segregation?
Then there’s Texas. Governor Greg Abbott, pushing beyond the limits of his state’s own power to control illegal immigration, rolled out razor wire and erected a floating barrier of huge buoys along the Rio Grande. He did that not just in violation of a federal law that regulates barriers in navigable rivers— it’s called the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act— but also in violation of an American treaty with Mexico that would prohibit it.
When the federal government asked Abbott to remove the buoys, he refused, which forced Washington this week to sue the state of Texas. Even a conservative member of the Texas House who represents the district where the buoys went up thinks the governor is wrong. “I think he’s gone overboard,” Representative Eddie Morales said. “It’s time that somebody put a check on our state government.”
But it won’t be Abbott. His response to the lawsuit? “Texas will see you in court.”
He wrote to President Biden that the Constitution allows states to expand their powers during a foreign invasion. That’s a straw man argument. You don’t have to be a judge to know, illegal immigration doesn’t rise to the level of a foreign invasion, nor did the founders have anything like this in mind when they created our governing document. In their day, this was a proud and productive nation of immigrants. Many of them were immigrants themselves.
This face-off has less to do with the effectiveness of Abbott’s provocative policies and more to do with whether his state has the right to flaunt federal law which, in matters of immigration, is supposed to prevail. And neither the situation in Texas nor the one in Alabama has to do with states’ rights, which give states the power to pass their own laws— guns and abortions are pretty visible if controversial examples today. What states’ rights don’t confer is the power to supersede, ignore, or usurp federal laws.
On the Trump indictment, it was strengthened yesterday by what appears to be hard proof of the ex-president’s criminal behavior: video and audio recordings confirming that Trump tried to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence” in the probe about the top-secret documents he unlawfully hauled down to Mar-a-Lago. But his defenders characteristically ignore the evidence and indict the investigators, using language right out of Trump’s playbook: this is “election interference,” the Justice Department has been “weaponized,” or as Trump himself charged last night, it’s “prosecutorial misconduct used at a level never seen before.”
He and the acolytes who back him up, politicians who raise hell about calls by left-wing extremists to defund police, are trying themselves not just to defund the FBI, but to dismantle it. Who are the extremists now?
Finally, those demands from the MAGA Party for the impeachment of the president. I won’t call them nonsense because we don’t know all the facts. But the thing is, neither do they. Yet under pressure from his hard-right flank, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said Tuesday, “How do you get to the bottom of the truth? The only way Congress can do that is go to an impeachment inquiry.”
And he’s only on the tail-end of the extremists.
Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene said on the floor of the House, “What I’m demanding is that the Republican-led House of Representatives move forward on an impeachment inquiry on Joe Biden, because this type of corruption should never be allowed to stand. We must expunge President Trump’s wrongful impeachments, and we must impeach Joe Biden.”
Isn’t that rich! She is calling for Biden’s impeachment for corruption she can’t document, but would take the two impeachments against MAGA’s monarch Donald Trump and wipe them from the record. She’s missing a major difference. Trump was impeached first for “abuse of power” with his phone call to extort Ukraine’s president Zelensky to dig up dirt on Trump’s then presidential rival Joe Biden. The call was recorded. The House had the goods on Trump. Then after January 6th he was impeached for “incitement of insurrection.” That was recorded too, ad infinitum. The House had the goods on Trump again. His accusers only lost in the Senate trials because spineless Republicans there defended their party’s leader.
But Joe Biden? All they’ve got on him right now is wishful thinking. Yes, there is very clearly criminal behavior by his son Hunter— although hardly rising to the level of a threat to the stability of our democracy— but Joe Biden’s adversaries want so badly to connect Hunter’s exploits to the president himself that their strategy is, act now, find out later.
What they don’t mention is that all they’ve got so far from hearings in three different House committees is lots of innuendo, lots of insinuation. They’re trying to elevate Hunter Biden’s crimes to the level of his father and maybe they’ll find a connection but so far at least, they don’t have the goods. In fact after Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley released a document with unsubstantiated allegations about both Bidens accepting bribes, none less than one of Rudy Giuliani’s disreputable associates, Lev Parnas— himself sentenced to prison last year for fraud and campaign finance crimes— said the senator was spreading “conspiracy theories.”
MAGA's minions are willing to abandon what has made America great to fortify their own personal power. If you don’t believe they would reshape the fundamental ways this country works, just look to places like Alabama and Texas and, if they proceed with a spurious impeachment, look to Washington DC. If you don’t believe they have totally co-opted what once was a reputable Republican Party, just ask Liz Cheney.
I feel sorry for citizens who have always been Republicans but find that their party has pulled away from them. The best thing they can do for now is pull away from the party.
Over more than 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, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other 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, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Well reported and commented on. Maybe the Maga idiots should spend 1 year in Niger when held accountable? Thanks Greg
The disrespect of our courts at the federal and state level has become a bi-partisan activity. When one side or the other dislikes a decision rightly or wrongly, they attack the court, the justices, and attempt to thwart the decisions. You gave great examples of how the Republicans acted but not long ago the US Supreme Court rendered its decision on abortion and attacks on the court came from the White House, calls from Democrat members of the house and senate encouraged people to march on the justices homes, others to defy the law, still others threats the justices, and some called to impeach those who held to overturn Roe. . In NY State in the dead of night the Democrat state legislature passed and the Democrat governor signed draconian laws, already parts of which lower NY state courts have found unconstitutional defying the Supreme Court’s decision to carry a firearm.
The fact is we are witnessing a time in our history where the rule of law and how we make and enforce them has become more like a restaurant menu where we pick and choose those we want and those we don’t.
The respect for the law, the judiciary and law enforcement has been severely diminished, and that is a real threat to our democracy. Both sides are to blame and it must!