Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis love political beatdown’s…
That has sunk down to lower level Republicans….
Hardcore politics IS on the rise from the Right…
They seem scared of what America IS today and continues to evolve into going forward….
Tennesse is just the first try…..
There WILL be more….
Democrats need to be vigilent and active as do judges…..
Republican leaders are now adopting increasingly autocratic measures, using the police powers of government to impose moralized regulations, turning private citizens into enforcement officers and expelling defiant elected Democrats just as county Republican parties, particularly in Western states, are electing militia members, Christian nationalists and QAnon believers to key posts….
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“On the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the democracy, conflict and governance program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a November 2022 Politico essay, “How Political Violence Went Mainstream on the Right.”
Those joining violent political events like the Jan. 6 insurrection, Kleinfeld continued,
are more likely to be married middle-aged men with jobs and kids. Those most likely to support violence on the right feel most connected to the Republican Party. This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.
Democrats are not driving today’s political violence, Kleinfeld argued…
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At the same time, Republican leaders are showing a growing willingness to disempower both Democratic officials and cities run by Democrats if they defy Republican-endorsed policies on matters as diverse as immigration, abortion and gun control…
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Republicans in states across the country are defiantly pushing for the criminalization of abortion — of the procedure, of abortifacient drugs and of those who travel out of state to terminate pregnancy — despite clear evidence, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, that public opinion had shifted in favor of abortion rights…
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At least three states with Republican governors — Florida, Virginiaand Texas — have adopted laws or regulations empowering private citizens to enforce restrictive policies governing abortion, sex education or the teaching of “critical race theory,” in some cases providing bounties for those reporting abortions.
Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, argues in his 2022 book, “Laboratories Against Democracy”:
When it comes to democratic backsliding in the states, the results couldn’t be clearer: over the past two decades, the Republican Party has eroded democracy in states under its control. Republican governments have gerrymandered districts, made it more difficult to vote and restricted civil liberties to a degree unprecedented since the civil rights era. It is not local changes in state-level polarization, competition or demographics driving these major changes in the rules of American democracy. Instead, it is the groups that make up the national coalition of the modern G.O.P. — the very wealthy on the one hand and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural resentment on the other……
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A consequence of this long-term cultural development for the losers, Norris continued, is a buildup of “resentment at the loss of the hegemony of traditional values and identities.” The problem for the Republican Party, she observed, lies in the fact that “by appealing to their shrinking socially conservative base, the Republican Party has been unable to gain a majority of the popular vote in their bid for the White House in eight of the last nine presidential elections.”…
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In a 2021 essay, “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time,” Richard Hasen, an election expert who is a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote:
A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.
Put another way, according to Hasen:
The Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s actions trying to change the Electoral College votes in five states, was an attempted coup built on the Big Lie of voter fraud. But the potential coup next time will come in neatly filed legal briefs and arguments quoting Thomas Jefferson and wrapped in ancient precedents and purported constitutional textualism. It will be no less pernicious….