Occam's Razor

I can understand if Republicans have an issue with the democracy thing. True democracy is direct rule by the people, which you can still find here in many towns here in New England. Those who show up at the town meeting get to vote on pressing local issues, which around here include weighty matters like whether to buy a new backhoe for the Town of Hadley.

Democracy won’t work on the national level, so our government was formed as a republican (representative) democracy. In a republic, democracy becomes indirect. You elect someone who reflects the will of the majority of voters (or a plurality, in some cases) in the district or state.

Democracy and republicanism are so fundamental to our country that our two major parties are the Democrats and the Republicans. Based on many egregious actions by state houses in Republican-controlled states though, the Republican Party no longer believes in its presumably founding principle: the virtue of a republican government.

Granted there’s been plenty of evidence this is true for many decades. It’s resulted in voter suppression laws and gerrymandered districts. All have one aim: to minimize the number of people Republicans don’t want voting and the power they could wield.

In Georgia though Republicans went crazy. A new law signed in by their Republican governor includes these way over-the-top voter suppression efforts:

• It’s now illegal to give food and water to voters waiting to vote, a practice only made necessary because the state reduced polling places in minority precincts
• It allows unlimited challenges to voter registrations
• Mail in voting requires attaching a copy of your driver’s license or other state issued ID
• It’s against the law for any group to mail you an absentee ballot application
• Mobile voting sites are illegal
• Voting out of precinct is illegal before 5 PM on voting day
• Vote drop boxes must be inside facilities, not outside them
• Their secretary of state no longer chairs the state’s election board
• The same board can temporarily suspend county election directors if they feel their elections need review. That way the counts can be added up “correctly”.

Georgia is but the most egregious and latest example of extremely alarming changes to voting rules by Republican-controlled states. These changes are actually signed into law now, while queues of other restrictive voting laws are being introduced in other states.

One state legislator in Arizona filed a bill that would have allowed the state to appoint its own electors to the Electoral College, which decides who will be president. Fortunately that was dropped, but a total of nineteen changes are being considered. In Pennsylvania, at least fourteen voting changes have been proposed that amount to new Jim Crow laws. The same is true in Michigan and many other states.

In short, Republicans are fine with people voting, as long as they can guarantee they will be elected. And if they can’t be, at least some Republican states are exploring allowing their legislatures to overturn the will of the voters, at least when it comes to who will receive their state’s electoral votes.

The animus of all this is hardly new: racism. Here it is 2021 and in these states they are still freaking out that people of color have voting rights! Moving toward the political center is apparently out of the question. They must have their cake and eat it too. They cannot compromise.

I fear where all this is heading. The long overdue response to all this is H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which Democrats have introduced. It would outlaw most of these voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics, and set uniform voting standards across the various states. It would in effect enable true republicanism, something that is increasingly anathema to actual Republicans! If this becomes law, it’s not hard to see what some states will prefer instead: open insurrection and a new civil war.

The bill is a five-alarm fire for the Republican Party. No wonder Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is sweating bullets over possibly getting rid of the Senate filibuster. For more than a hundred years, the primary use of the filibuster has been to control people of color and make sure they have fewer privileges than the rest of us. It appears the thing that Republicans fear most is not those they don’t like getting power, but having to compromise their racist principles in order to get power.

The For the People Act is not necessarily great news for the Democratic Party either. By outlawing gerrymandering, it could end up actually serving the aim of Republicans to put Democrats in the minority. What it is likely to do though is to break the gridlock by electing slews of moderates who are now largely locked out of Congress. This act could actually make government work again.

That’s a price this Democrat is happy to pay.