Confronting the Pillars of Republican Politics
Democratic systems are premised on the concept that political parties will compete for votes in a marketplace of ideas and public policies. That, however, no longer seems to be how things are done in the planet’s premiere democracy. Instead, politics in the U.S. has become a battle of political gamesmanship rather than a contest of ideas. That’s because for the past 30 years the Republican Party has placed winning elections above governing the country (see, “Partisan Politics”). This became all too obvious in the 2020 election when the Republican Party did not even bother to put forward a platform advising the electorate what actions it planned to pursue and it leader was already on record as having expressed his view that policies are boring.
Despite his two impeachments, his overwhelming defeat in the 2020 election, and his failed attempt to retain the presidency by inciting an insurrection, the Republican Party still treats Donald Trump as its leader and presumed 2024 presidential nominee. A week ago Trump’s control over the Republican Party was again confirmed when 55% of the representatives attending the CPAC convention voted for him in a straw poll as their choice to be the Republican 2024 presidential nominee. Ron DeSantis, who finished second, mustered less than half as many supporters.
Having passed up their opportunity to have the Democrats bring Trump’s political career to an end in the recent impeachment proceeding and feeling trapped into supporting him for the foreseeable future, Republican leaders have few choices in mapping their political strategy. It’s not that they don’t appreciate Trump’s political skills. They fully recognize that even in losing the 2020 election, he amassed more votes than any prior presidential candidate -- and not by a small margin. That feat is even more impressive when considered in the context of the dismal mess he created while governing the country. The only problem is that as successful as he was in exciting Republican voters, he was even more effective in motivating Democrats to go to the polls.
The problem faced by Republican politicians in the forthcoming elections is further complicated by the fact that there is very little they will be able to argue in the way of public policy that will help them attract more voters. At this point, they will hardly be able to garner more votes by campaigning on further tax cuts for the rich. Nor will their claims that they are better managers of the economy win over many voters after they caused the nation’s GDP to tank in 2020 and caused the national debt to grow by more than $8 trillion in four years. Even claims that they are the champions of the working class will fall on deaf ears in view of their pro-business/anti-union predilections and their current opposition to raising the minimum wage. Also, a pledge to cut regulations won’t win many votes when such efforts haven’t helped to create any manufacturing or mining jobs. Even their tried and true pledge to appoint conservative judges has lost its appeal now that conservative jurists already dominate the federal judiciary (including the Supreme Court) and will likely do so for years (if not, decades) to come. Similarly, their message that Democrats will move the nation toward socialism can’t be expected to attract many voters when Democratic social welfare programs were the only things that enabled most Americans to physically and financially survive the COVID pandemic. I could go on, but by now I’m sure you’ve gotten my point.
Even though Biden won a landslide victory over Trump he was largely unable to help Democratic candidates running in down-ballot races. While this sounds like good news for Republican politicians, that election occurred before so many Republican legislators and local officeholders supported a blatant scheme to overthrow the results of a democratic election and condoned an insurrection fomented by their party’s leader. Thus, when Trump will not be on the ballot to excite Republican voters and when their own past behavior will be prominently featured in Democratic attack ads, their only viable strategy for the 2022 elections will be to focus their energies on trying to limit the number of votes that the Democrats are likely to receive. This realization has not escaped the Republican politicians who in the last four months have introduced roughly 250 bills in 43 states to make voting more difficult.
This would not be a novel situation for Republicans who have become accustomed accustomed to running for political office without the benefit of having the support of a majority of the voters. Beginning in reconstruction days, southern state politicians (now a major faction within the Republican Party) became exceedingly adept at preventing minorities from voting. On top of that, Republicans throughout the nation have mastered the art of gerrymandering election districts. In addition, Congressional Republicans have spent the last thirty years obstructing the legislative agendas of Democratic administrations; and more recently, Donald Trump has shown them how to get away with lying by constantly repeating the lie and never admitting its falsity. These anti-democratic tactics have become the current pillars of Republican politics. In fairness, Republicans didn’t invent most of them, but the limited appeal of their pro-business agenda has led them to perfect and rely upon them.
Voter Suppression
Voter suppression tactics take many forms and there currently seem to be new ones popping up every day. The most common forms of voter suppression tactics are focused on the process of voting. These include limitations on the number, placement, and hours of polling stations. These restrictions are designed to make voting inconvenient or to create long lines and waits at polling stations which disproportionately affect Democratic voters who can ill-afford to take off from work and suffer the loss of even a few hours of pay. Limiting voting hours and polling stations becomes an even more effective deterrent to voting when combined with limitations on the use of mail ballots.
A citizen must be registered to vote In order to cast a ballot and Republicans employ a panoply of tactics to make registering to vote more difficult. These include requiring special types of identification such as a driver’s license with the licensee’s picture and signature. Many low-income workers don’t own a car and therefore don’t have a driver’s license. Voter registration is also restricted by limiting people and organizations who may assist others in becoming registered. Yet another voter registration hurdle is requiring voters to amend their registration each time they move into a new voting precinct. This is particularly effective in suppressing the votes of poorer people who are more likely to rent, rather than own, their homes and, therefore, tend to move more frequently.
A related voter suppression tactic is to periodically purge voter registration rolls. Admittedly states have a duty to keep their voter lists up-to-date so as to preclude voting in the name of persons who have moved out of state or who have passed away. They frequently use this rationale to preclude students attending college within their state from voting, claiming that a student’s primary residence is in his/her home state. A related tactic is to purge voters whose mail has been returned to election officials with a notation that the addressee has moved.
In the last three months, Republican legislators have introduced a host of new voter suppression measures. These changes include limitations on the use and harvesting of mail ballots, limitations on unsolicited dissemination of mail ballots, and limitations on assisting persons at polling stations who might have to wait up to eight hours to vote. These measures are being proposed on the premise that they will prevent fraud in the voting process, a phenomenon that has become extremely rare over the past forty years. Although Trump and many Republican elected officials railed against voter fraud in the 2020 election, no significant voter fraud was found by state election officials, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security or presented in the more than 60 court cases filed as a part of the Trump Campaign’s efforts to overturn the results of the election.
Democrats have tried with only limited success to have the courts throw out Republican voter suppression tactics arguing that Republican controlled legislatures are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and in the process are disenfranchising millions of voters. The courts, however, are loath to second-guess legislatures which possess fact-finding powers not bestowed upon them. They, therefore, tend to limit their intervention to cases in which it can be proven that the voter suppression efforts in fact discriminate on the basis of sex, race or ethnicity.
Recent developments in the State of Georgia have shown that voter suppression tactics can be successfully overcome by carefully crafted and well-financed plans to register voters and assist them in the voting process. Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 bid to become the Governor of Georgia after (and likely the result of) her opponent’s purge of over 300,000 Georgians from the state’s voting rolls. In 2020 she retaliated by organizing the registration of 800,000 Democratic voters which helped seal the victories in her state of the Democratic presidential and two senatorial nominees. Throughout the South, there are large African-American and Hispanic populations that have traditionally not participated in the electoral process. Thus, similar campaigns undertaken in the States of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina could achieve like results. In fact, there are now at least a handful of Democratic organizations that are currently working to make this happen.
Electoral District Gerrymandering
Although there is a requirement that electoral districts contain a roughly equal number of residents, state legislators are given great latitude in determining the actual boundaries of their electoral districts as long as they don’t discriminate in a manner prohibited by the 14th Amendment. The term “gerrymandering” refers to the now highly common practice of drawing electoral districts that will maximize the legislative representation of the party in control of the state’s government. In some cases, gerrymandered electoral districts can greatly skew a party’s legislative representation by creating safe districts for the party controlling the process. Over the years Republicans have turned such practices into a science using detailed maps, voter registration rolls and computers, resulting in a great imbalance in legislative representation as well as the creation of electoral districts with some very unusual shapes.
The courts are also understandably reluctant to become the arbiters of legislative districts finding that such issues to be the province of the legislative branch. As a result, they have not been receptive to challenges that congressional districting plans unfairly affect a party’s legislative representation unless it can be proven that the districts discriminate in a manner that violates the 14th Amendment. This poses a particular problem for the Democratic Party because its supporters tend to be concentrated in urban areas making it possible to encapsulate Democratic voters in a small number of electoral districts, making the balance of the state’s electoral districts either safe for Republican candidates or at least competitive. Notwithstanding the reluctance of the courts to become involved in considering electoral districting, court challenges to gerrymandered districts continue to be a major political battleground.
Perhaps the best defense against gerrymandering comes in the form of statewide referendums seeking to enact constitutional amendments which would limit the legislature’s flexibility in drawing electoral districts. In some cases, those amendments regulate the permissible shape of the district and in a few states they have placed the establishment of electoral districts in the hands of a non-partisan commission.
Legislative Obstructionism
The purpose of legislative obstructionism is to prevent the party holding the presidency from achieving any legislative victories which could be used to encourage voters in the next election. Preventing an incumbent administration from enacting legislation in support of its agenda also gives the party out of power the ability to complain that their opponents achieved little while holding the reins of government. Recall that after successfully blocking most of legislative initiatives of the Obama administrative, the Republican Party railed against “the failed policies of the Obama administration” to significantly increase their majority in the House in the 2014 election.
Legislative obstructionism generally takes one of three forms and predominately takes place in the U.S. Senate where the debate on a bill continues until a motion is adopted to terminate debate. Traditionally, a cloture motion has required a supermajority to be approved. This is intended to prevent a majority party from imposing its will over the objections of minority members. This cloture procedure has no counterpart in the House of Representatives where the duration of legislative debate is determined in advance by the House Rules Committee.
The most common form of legislative obstruction is the “filibuster” in which one or more senators simply continue to debate features of the proposed legislation until there is a successful cloture vote or the majority, in frustration, simply agrees to table the bill and move on to other business. The practice of filibustering was rarely used until the 1960s when southern senators insisted upon prolonging debate over civil rights legislation as a means of preventing that legislation from ever coming to a vote. In those days, senators wishing to block legislation were required to hold the Senate floor for hours on end, often simply reading the newspaper into the Congressional Record. Since the majority party did not have the votes to terminate the debate, civil rights legislation for the most part could be successfully blocked. Because the practice of filibustering took so many hours away from the time the Senate could engage in constructive actions, in the 1970s and 1980s the Senate modified its cloture rule on several occasions, finally deciding to simply end the charade of having senators pretend to be debating a bill. Under the modified cloture (or “filibuster”) rule, a senator opposing legislation simply had to announce his/her objections and the bill would be immediately tabled unless at least 60 senators voted to proceed with the bill.
This change eliminated empty hours during which all Senate action could be brought to a halt, but it also made it a lot easier to block legislation. This became evident during Obama’s presidency when Republicans engineered over 160 separate filibusters. Previously, no administration had been faced with more than a dozen filibusters. This continued abuse caused Senate Democrats, in frustration, to exclude the confirmation of lower court judicial nominees and administrative nominees from the 60-vote requirement. In 2017, the Republicans expanded this exception to the cloture rule to Supreme Court nominees. Even so, filibustering remains available for most legislation and Republicans are most likely to rely upon this tactic to prevent the Biden administration from achieving many of its legislative goals.
The second tactic is to mount a concerted opposition to legislation even in the face of overwhelming public support. This just happened with President Biden’s COVID relief legislation and his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage both of which enjoy not only the support of a majority of Americans (77%), but that of a majority of registered Republican voters (59%) as well. Politicians can always point to some facet of a legislative proposal to justify their opposition, but the entire democratic process is built on the premise that legislation should be weighed on the basis of its overall impact as the very products of legislative debate are likely to leave some level of unhappiness among all legislators.
The third form of legislative obstructionism is to simply refuse to consider a legislative proposal when the obstructing party controls one of the two houses of Congress. While this tactic was used in 2016 to scuttle President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to become a justice of the Supreme Court, there are countless other examples involving purely legislative matters. In the most recently completed session of Congress the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed over 200 bills which Mitch McConnell, in his role as Senate Majority Leader, simply refused to allow the Senate to consider. Similarly, in 2013 the Senate approved a sweeping immigration reform bill which John Boehner, who was then the Speaker of the House, refused to allow the House to consider because a majority of his caucus members disapproved of it even though a majority of the members of the House were in favor of it.
There is no doubt that legislative obstructionism will be a central feature of the Republican plan to regain control of the House and Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. As noted above, Congressional Republicans have already (but unsuccessfully) stonewalled President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief legislation which was enacted via the budget reconciliation process previously described in my article entitled “Biden’s Legislative Strategies.” Because of likely Republican obstructionism, Biden’s infrastructure bill will also have to be enacted using the budget reconciliation process. Both of these pieces of legislation currently enjoy widespread popular support because they will provide a large number of jobs and give a big boost to the nation’s economy.
Legislative obstructionism, which has now become imbedded in the DNA of the Republican Party, is a potentially dangerous political tactic. That’s because, if properly addressed, it can have adverse repercussions on the obstructing party. Whether that happens will depend on how the incumbent party reacts. If it immediately embarks upon a public relations campaign to extoll the virtues of its legislative achievements, the opposing party can be made to suffer at the polls for it destructive behavior. During the Obama administration, just the opposite happened. Democrats were able to pass the Affordable Care Act which enabled over 25 million previously uninsured American to acquire health insurance. In response, Republicans immediately began attacking that legislation and were highly successful in convincing the public that the ACA was a disaster. As a result, the Democrats declined to tout their principal legislative achievement in the 2012 election and Republicans increased their majority representation in the House from 34 seats to 59 seats. In order to make Republicans pay for their current obstructionist tactics, the Biden administration will need to conduct a public relations campaign bringing to the attention of the public all of the positive features of its legislative achievements. If the public continues to be convinced of their merits, Republican opposition to them will likely adversely affect their chances of success in the 2022 mid-term elections.
Many of the items on the Biden administration’s legislative agenda cannot be passed using the budget reconciliation process. Those items will also require strong public relations campaigns before they are even introduced and should include enlisting the support of the nation’s governors insofar as is possible. This will greatly increase the pressure on Republican legislators to either drop their opposition or face the wrath of the voters in their next election. In short, the antidotes to legislative obstructionism are (1) accomplish as much as possible so as to engender goodwill with the voters, and (2) generate public support for those accomplishments as well as for legislative agenda items that may not be enacted so that their opponents will pay a price for their obstructionism.
Disinformation Campaigns
Character assassination has been a part of American presidential politics since George Washington relinquished the presidency. Such tactics have not always been limited to truthful information as false rumors of marital infidelity, bribery and misconduct in office have invaded most presidential campaigns. Today’s electoral disinformation campaigns have taken on two new qualities. They are now echoed by a well-establish group of media outlets and they are no longer limited to besmirching the character of a political candidate. Just as often these disinformation campaigns are designed to sow dissention among the voters of the opposing party in an effort to dissuade them from participating in the electoral process. Similarly, they are used to motivate the voters in the party of the candidate they seek to elect. Trump’s recent “Stop the Steal” campaign is an example of this latter use.
Newspapers and broadcast networks subject to FCC regulations are potentially vulnerable to defamation suits if it can be proven that they have maliciously defamed a political candidate. As a result, these organizations carefully monitor the information that they disseminate and are generally quick to publish a retraction when false information is occasionally published. The problem is that erroneous opinions are not generally actionable. This generally gives all media organizations considerable latitude in publishing derogatory information that might affect the outcome of an election. To make matters worse, cable news organizations and social networks have no similar exposure. In fact, social networks currently enjoy immunity from defamation claims, something even Donald Trump finds unacceptable -- notwithstanding the fact that he’s a principal disseminator of false information. In short, the United States is currently awash in disinformation disseminated for the purpose of affecting political elections. This explains why 75% of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump even though state election officials, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the courts have found otherwise.
This situation is difficult to rectify because freedom of speech is a highly prized right in the United States. This means that every effort to limit or punish false speech of almost every variety is given close scrutiny by the courts. As a result, the normal remedy for false information is to counter it with truthful information. That currently provides less than satisfactory recourse as the nation has become so politically divided that most people tend to obtain their information from a single source. If that source has been fully contaminated with false information, they may never be exposed to the truth. This problem has become significantly worse with the rise of social media.
This leaves Democrats with essentially two courses of action. They can seek to regulate cable broadcast and social media organizations. If Democrats label such efforts as attacks on “Fake News” Republicans will still oppose them even though they might feel uncomfortable in doing so because most of their supporters associate “Fake News” with left-leaning newspapers and news organizations. A second way to combat disinformation is to threaten and/or institute libel/slander litigation against individuals and media outlets that disseminate disinformation. This tactic recently proved successful in getting Newsmax to retract false statements being disseminated by one of its commentators. Instituting a legal action can be an expensive strategy, though, and court victories are likely to be few and far between. As Donald Trump has learned, it’s far more preferable to simply threaten a defamation suit than to actually institute one and threats tend to be more effective when the offending party has limited resources with which to mount a defense.
The Nuclear Option
By far the most effective way of overcoming Republican voter suppression efforts would be to enact the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act and the “For the People Act.” Both of these bills were recently passed in the House and now await action in the Senate. They would, among other things, (a) provide for automatic voter registration for some and require states to make available internet based voter registration, (b) require the use of paper ballots which would assure the ability to audit the vote, (c) require that early voting be made readily available, (d) expand the use of voting by mail and require that drop boxes for mail ballots be made readily available, (d) appropriate $1 billion to upgrade in state voting systems, (e) curtail gerrymandering of electoral districts by requiring the establishment of independent redistricting commissions , (f) restore parts of the Civil Rights Act gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder, (g) limit the purging of voters from voter registration rolls, (h) prohibit certain deceptive campaign practices, (i) establish uniform standards for treating provisional ballots, (j) crack down on voter intimidation and (k) require greater disclosure of the sources of campaign financing and limit the use of “dark money”.
While these two bills would go a long way to prevent efforts to suppress voting in federal elections, the chances of their being enacted into law currently remain remote at best. Neither bill would qualify for passage via the budget reconciliation process and they are unlikely to receive even a single Republican vote in the Senate, much less the ten Republican votes that would be required just to allow them to be considered. In fact, the only conceivable way in which they could be enacted in the current Congress is through a further change in the Senate’s cloture (“filibuster”) rule which no Republican would support and which at least two Democratic Senators are already on record as opposing. Moreover, Senate Republicans have threatened that if the Democrats seek to change that rule they would use every opportunity to delay and/or prevent the passage of every item of legislation presented by the Democrats.
There’s little doubt that Republican Senators would follow that course since they are already pursuing it. This week, not only did no Republican Senator vote in favor of considering the Biden administration’s COVID relief bill, but Senator Johnson demanded that all 628 pages of the bill be read aloud in the Senate while he was the only Republican Senator present. Were the circumstances of the parties reversed and the issue was a bill to impose nationwide voter suppression measures, there is little doubt that the Republicans would have few qualms about dispensing with the filibuster rule. Their treatment of Merrick Garland’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nominations makes that abundantly clear.
Answering one bad deed with another, however, is not a helpful course of action when trying to make a democratic government more functional. For a democracy to function there must be goodwill and trust between opposing political factions. Unfortunately, turning the other cheek in this case will only encourage further bad behavior. This has already been established in two Trump impeachment proceedings. Thus, responding in kind may be the only way to convince an already morally bankrupt Republican Party that it needs to abandon its current anti-democratic practices. The question that remains is whether the Democratic leadership in the Senate will be able convince Senators Manchin and Simena that dispensing with the filibuster rule, even if only to enact these two critical pieces of legislation, is the best way to proceed.