In other post-election news, outgoing GOP losers in Wisconsin and Michigan have decided to wave their dicks in the faces of the voters by passing laws that curtail the power of incoming Democratic governors.
The Wisconsin power grab is part of a bigger Republican attack on democracy$1:
The Wisconsin Republican Party is nullifying the results of the 2018 election.
On Wednesday morning, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill that would seize key powers from incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who defeated incumbent Gov. Scott Walker in November. Walker is expected to sign it in the coming days.
The bill blocks Evers’s ability to change state welfare policy and withdraw from a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — two things he campaigned on. It limits the state’s early voting period, a move that would make it harder for Democrats to win future elections. And this is all happening during the lame-duck session before Evers takes power, rushed through quickly in an explicit effort to weaken Democrats and prevent the new governor from doing what he was elected to do. In essence, Wisconsin Republicans are telling the state’s voters that their preferences will be ignored.
This would be troubling enough if it were a one-off. But it’s not.
Michigan Republicans are currently weighing similar plans, and both are following in the footsteps of North Carolina Republicans, who passed a power-stripping bill after a Democratic victory in the 2016 governor’s race. State Republicans in three of the country’s most vital swing states are displaying open contempt for the most basic principle of democracy: that when you lose an election, you have to hand over power to your opponents. The national party hasn’t condemned these power grabs, giving the state legislatures tacit permission to rewrite the rules.
These power grabs highlight one of the most disturbing facts about American politics today: The Republican Party has become institutionally indifferent to the health of democracy. It prioritizes power over principle to such an extreme degree that it undermines the most basic functioning of democracy.
In the long run, the GOP’s turn against democracy could well be a greater threat to the American experiment than anything President Donald Trump has done.
Why the state power grabs are so scary
The specifics of the power-stripping efforts vary from state to state — my colleague Tara Golshan has a great explanation of the details in each case — but share a fundamentally similar structure. Each one curtails the governor’s ability to make changes to Republican-backed policies like welfare work requirements, and political rules like campaign finance regulation. Republican-controlled legislatures are given enhanced powers to block governors’ moves through measures such as handing them control over state bureaucracies. And these bills all happen during lame-duck sessions, specifically subverting the results of elections that just happened.
Republican legislators sometimes bill the laws as high-minded protections of the separation of powers, but no one is fooled. The goal is to prevent Democrats from overturning Republican policy initiatives and electoral rules that help Republicans win statewide elections.
Wisconsin Speaker of the House Robin Vos was quite clear on this point during the debate over the bills. At one point, he warned Republicans that if they don’t pass the power grab, they “are going to have a very liberal governor who is going to enact policies that are in direct contrast to what many of us believe in.” That “very liberal governor” had of course just been voted in by the people of Wisconsin, presumably to enact the policies he had campaigned on.
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The post-election power grabs amount to Republicans declaring that they no longer accept that fundamental bargain. They do not believe it’s legitimate when they lose, or that they are obligated to hand over power to Democrats because that’s what’s required in a fair system. Political power, to the state legislators in question, matters more than the core bargain of democracy.
Now, a certain level of working the refs is inevitable in a democratic system. American politicians, as Georgetown’s Matt Glassman notes, have always tinkered with the system’s rules to give themselves and their favored policies a leg up. For instance, Democrats in Massachusetts back in 2004 tried to amend the rules for Senate vacancies to make sure that then-Gov. Mitt Romney couldn’t appoint a Republican to the Senate if then-Sen. John Kerry won his bid for the presidency.
But literally stripping powers from officials of the opposing party after they win elections goes well beyond this kind of tinkering. It’s nothing less than a rejection of the idea that the people should get to decide who rules them, a point that many political scientists were quick to highlight after the Wisconsin bill passed.
“By undermining the results of the midterms, the GOP makes a mockery of the notion that elections matter,” Jaime Dominguez, a political scientist at Northwestern University, told me via email. The Wisconsin law is “a breathtaking assault on the most basic democratic norm: the willingness of the loser of an election to let the winner rule,” Yascha Mounk, a fellow at Harvard scholar who studies democratic breakdown, tweeted.
There’s also a broader context. Republicans have, for years now, engaged in a systematic and nationally coordinated effort to rewrite the rules of the political game in their favor. What’s happening in Wisconsin and Michigan is only the latest manifestation of a broader anti-democratic trend, which in the past decade or so has become part of the party’s identity.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/6/18127332/wisconsin-state-republican-power-grab-democracy
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