A piece about Republicans, who ARE a minority party in America that has been working hard to shut out opposition voters and parties to stay in power….
It began before Donald Trump….
It has now accelerated since Trump’s efforts for himself failed last November…
Most Republicans and the Right seems afraid of how America moves thru the 21st Century…
And now they seem to be doing a cleaning of those in-house Republicans who did stand up for Democracy and the ‘Rule of Law’ in the last election Chait says…
After Georgia Republicans experienced the shocking setback of losing the state’s presidential election, the party descended into bitter internal recriminations. President Trump blamed Republican officials for allowing massive voter fraud to steal the state; many state Republicans blamed Trump’s rhetoric for losing a winnable race.
But both Republican factions heartily agree on the proper corrective steps: a sweeping bill curtailing voting rights and handing new powers to Republican legislators to prevent the unfortunate events of 2020–21 from happening again. After the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, a target of Trump’s rage, signed the measure, the former president offered his hearty congratulations. “They learned from the travesty of the 2020 Presidential Election, which can never be allowed to happen again,” the former President wrote in an official statement. “Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!”
If you want to understand why this is happening, a timely new paper by University of Washington political scientist Jacob Grumbach helps explain. Grumbach surveys the performance of every state government across a broad array of measures of democratic health, such as indices of voting access like wait times and same-day and automatic voter-registration policies, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and civil rights. His paper finds that the states that backslid on democratization over the past 16 years were shared a single characteristic: Republicans gained full control of their state government…
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The next time a Republican attempts to subvert an election result, there won’t be any inconvenient law-bound officials standing in the way. The power to act on Trump’s farrago of lies will rest in the hands of elected officials accountable to the party’s constituents. Rather than arresting the Republican party’s long slide into authoritarianism, Trump’s departure has accelerated it….
Note…
While Chait makes good points it should also be pointed out that for now?
Several of those Republicans who spoke out against Trump have survived some party efforts to remove them from power for the time being….
Chairs analysis is spot on.
As for “those Republicans who spoke out against Trump?”
They are not major players in the party so who cares?
But even those Republicans who spoke out against Trump are almost entirely comfortable with the GOP plan to make it harder for eligible voters to vote and they support more power to Republican legislatures