It’s been an especially busy week, so output has been less than I would like. But I did want to briefly a flag a handful of items, all with a common theme:
1.The House passed a bill today that would clarify the 1887 Electoral Count Act. That’s the law that Trumpists insisted gave Vice President Mike Pence the authority to overturn the will of the voters, as determined by the states, in the 2020 presidential election.
The House bill
…would amend the 1887 Electoral Count Act to remove any doubt that the vice president's role in counting Electoral College votes is simply ministerial. It would lift the threshold for members of Congress to force a vote on discounting presidential electors from just one member of the House and the Senate each to one-third of both chambers. And it would require governors to send electors to Congress for the candidate who won, based on state law set before Election Day, which cannot be retroactively changed.
It appears that the parallel bill in the Senate has ten GOP co-sponsors, so it has a reasonable chance of becoming law, which would be good news.
The bad news - the Bill passed by a vote of 229-203. Every Democrat voted in favor, joined by only nine Republicans, including co-sponsor Liz Cheney, out of 212. All nine, including Cheney, are either retiring or have lost their primaries already this cycle. That means *zero* returning House Republicans will have voted for a bill whose purpose is so obviously what the original law intended that where the GOP not in thrall to Trumpism,, it would be a silly waste of time to need a new law. The vast majority of the GOP, included its political elites, now operates by the proposition that an elected Democratic president is, by definition, an illegitimate one.
2.That fact is evident in high stakes state races throughout the country. Just this week, Mark Finchem, the GOP nominee for Arizona Secretary of State, said categorically that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election in Arizona and that it was “fantasy” to believe that he could win, fair and square, in 2024. According to current polling, Finchem currently leads his race against Democrat Adrian Fontes. As I’ve previously noted, election deniers are running up and down the ballot and across the country, including in races for governor, secretary of state and state attorney general, the positions that would directly affect election certification.
3.Jamelle Bouie writes this week about how the great migration of Black Americans from the South to the North across the early to middle decades of the twentieth century brought about an eventual transformation of the Democratic Party from one anchored in the segregationist South to one in which the balance of power tilted toward northern and western pro-civil rights blocs.
The problem for our political system today is that:
There is no equivalent to northern Black voters in the Trumpified Republican Party. Put differently, there is no large and pivotal group of Republicans who can exert cross-pressure on MAGA voters. Instead, the further the Republican Party goes down the rabbit hole of “stop the steal” and other conspiracy theories, the more it loses voters who could apply that pressure.
In a normal, more majoritarian political system, this dynamic would eventually fix the issue of the MAGA Republican Party. Parties want to win, and they will almost always shift gears when it’s clear they can’t with their existing platform, positions and leadership.
The problem is that the American political system, in its current configuration, gives much of its power to the party with the most supporters in all the right places. Republicans may have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but key features in the system…gives them a powerful advantage on the playing field of national politics.
Bouie uses this analysis to explain why Glenn Youngkin, elected governor of mostly blue Virginia in 2021, would eagerly campaign for election-denying Trumpists across the country, in preparation for his own likely future presidential run. When it comes to political viability in the GOP, there is only one viable game in town.
The GOP is, right now, an authoritarian party-in-waiting. The only question is whether they will get the chance to put into practice what so many of their candidates, including their presumptive 2024 standard-bearer - and backed by the clear majority of GOP voters - are promising to do.
This is so accurate and so frightening.