This
morning, in front of my foggy bathroom mirror, I try once again to
enunciate the phrase I've had trouble saying without a shudder now
for more than a month, “President-elect T-tr-tr-um . . .”
Don't
worry. I'll get it right some day. But, I still wonder, why did just
enough Americans in the right states pick a former-reality TV star
with no experience in government to be the 45th President
of the United States?
Is
it FBI Director Comey's fault? Or, perhaps, the blame lies with
Russian hackers? Or fake news? Or uneducated whites? Or, maybe, it's
the fault of our anachronistic and undemocratic Electoral College?
Take
your pick. They've all been written about extensively, but one reason
hasn't received nearly enough attention. That the winning party, the
Republicans, has been involved in a long-term, well-funded project,
not to steal Christmas like the Grinch – that would be small
potatoes – but American democracy, itself.
This project can be
traced back to corporate lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice
Lewis Powell's infamous 1971 memo, a reveille, not for radicals, but
for big business to organize against – well, us, the people. Powell
laid it all out, calling for “careful
long-range planning and implementation,” backed by a “scale of
financing available only through joint effort.”
As
chronicled in Jane Mayer's essential Dark
Money:
The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical
Right,
a
handful of right-wing billionaires, the Kochs, the Scaifes, the
Olins, the DeVoses, and a few others took up Lewis Powell's clarion
call and have worked tirelessly over many years to turn our country
rightward. To install a government to do their biding, to allow their
companies the liberty to rook the suckers with impunity and pollute
our air and water without the interference of pointy-headed
bureaucrats.
They
have poured billions of dollars into a dizzying array of think tanks,
foundations, and action committees. They've bought off media and
universities. In fact, they've even founded their own media, with
their own set of “facts.”
Meanwhile,
with gobs of ready cash, the right-wing funded the Federalist Society
and bought their way into America's law schools to turn the courts
and the country rightward. And their hard work has paid off
handsomely.
In
2010, the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling made our politicians
even more reliant on the top 1%, whose interests are diametrically
opposed to most Americans. But
not stopping there, in 2013, Republican-appointed judges on
the Supreme Court defanged the Voting Rights Act.
Since
then, Republican state legislatures have passed voter ID laws and
purged voter rolls in order to deny their fellow citizens, mostly
Democrats, their precious right to vote.
As
Mehdi Hasan explained inThe Washington Post,
in North Carolina, “[on] the eve of the election, a federal judge
said she was 'horrified' by the 'insane' process by which people were
'being purged' from the voter rolls. In July, a three-judge panel
ruled that the state’s 2013 voting law could only be explained by
'discriminatory intent'” because it was obviously aimed at keeping
African Americans from voting.
This
“systematic disenfranchisement,” according to political reporters
Alice Ollstein and Kira Lerner,
“was
intentional and politically motivated. In the years leading up to
2016, Republican governors and state legislatures implemented new
laws restricting when, where, and how people could vote — laws
that disproportionately harmed students, the poor, and people of
color. In several instances, lawmakers pushing such policies said
explicitly that their goal was suppression of voters who favor the
Democratic Party.”
As
Zachary Roth succinctly put it inThe Great Suppression: Voting
Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy,
“At its core, this bold campaign has amounted to nothing less than
an effort to undermine democracy.”
It's
worth noting that Republicans originally got into the driver's seat
in battleground states because in 2010 they used every trick in the
book and then some to win majorities in order to gerrymander their
way to more and more power during the decennial redistricting,
regardless of their minority status.
In
2010, they blanketed districts with libelous mailers, shamelessly
sliming their Democratic opponents. Then having won, they redrew
districts with laser-like precision by using a computer program
called Maptitude. In Ohio, Republicans were able to win 75% of U.S.
House seats with just 51% of the vote. In Pennsylvania, according to
Dave Daley's accurately-named Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the
Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy, Pennsylvania
Republicans won 72% of the House seats with only 49% of the vote.
So
by hijacking the courts; using computer programs to ruthlessly
redistrict and thus, to effectively disenfranchise so many voters;
and by then passing voter ID laws while purging voter rolls, all to
keep Democratic constituencies from exercising their right to vote,
the Republicans have blatantly stolen American democracy in order to
seize power.
Republicans
now control both the executive and legislative branches of the
federal government. And very soon, after a new right-wing justice is
appointed, they will control all 3 branches of the federal
government.
This
naked thievery of our democracy has been in reality a slow-motion
coup that has led directly to the election of a rich vulgarian unfit
by both temperament and experience to be the 45th
President of the United States and, also, to me, still sadly standing
in front of my foggy bathroom mirror, trying not to choke on my own
words.
