The More Republicans Lose, the Harder They Work to Rig the Game
9:05 P.M.
By Jonathan Chait@jonathanchait
Even by the standards of a Republican-run state, Wisconsin’s legislature is gerrymandered so ruthlessly that the 2018 elections, in which voters supported Democrats by a 54-to-46-percent margin in the State Assembly, nonetheless delivered Republicans 64 percent of the seats. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, asked about the gerrymander, argued that it was perfectly fair. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he told reporters after the election. In Vos’s mind, the fact that many Democratic voters resided in the state’s two largest cities rendered them undeserving of equal representation.
Indeed, as Vos saw it, if there was anything unfair about the system, it was the process for electing the governor. Democrat Tony Evers had defeated incumbent Republican Scott Walker by nearly 30,000 votes, and the fact that this result was arrived at by counting votes of city residents exactly the same as votes of people in small towns did not sit easily with Vos. “I do not like the fact that Madison and Milwaukee chose Governor Evers and they’re the reason that he won,” he said.
And so Vos and his party set out to rectify the injustice. In the last weeks before Evers takes office, the lame-duck all-Republican government swept through a series of votes designed to weaken the incoming governor. Some of the measures curbed his policy authority, like the ability to appoint members to an economic-development commission. Others were intended to suppress voters in future elections, like a rollback on early voting, a blow to low-income Democrats who have difficulty getting away from work and family obligations to stand in a crowded voting line on a Tuesday. “We 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,” he told reporters. That the “very liberal governor” had won a fair election did not seem to matter. “Where I live,” Vos tweeted from the State Assembly’s account, referring to the areas of the state that should not be subject to a one-person-one-vote election Republicans might lose, “people have said do whatever you have to do to make sure the reforms that have been positive for Wisconsin don’t go away.”
“Do whatever you have to do” to get the outcome you want. Donald Trump’s gold-embossed version of authoritarianism, inflected with narcissism and a Mafia ethos, is highly distinctive and, at least to some Republican elites, occasionally unsettling. But Trump did not invent the broader distrust of democracy infecting his party. Nor is the philosophy espoused by Vos merely some alarming idiosyncrasy coming from one legislator in Wisconsin. In fact, paradoxically, the black-swan nature of Trump’s presidency is obscuring a decades-long project that, should the grand American experiment in self-government end in ruin, could easily bear more responsibility for its death than any single president.
Like many political innovations, the anti-democracy project has developed in Republican-controlled states, where over the past dozen years members of the GOP have enacted a wide array of restrictions designed to discourage minorities and students from voting by making the practice as burdensome as possible: forcing them to acquire photo identification from state offices with limited locations and hours, reducing the hours and number of voting stations, carrying out frequent purges that force voters to reregister. Very few Republicans or conservative intellectuals raised any objection to these practices, which at first attracted significant media attention. But the shock has worn off, the maneuvers have become something like standard operating procedure for state-level Republican governance, and we now inhabit a political reality in which Republicans looking to exploit the powers of minority control have become even more brazen in their tactics.
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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/when-republicans-lose-they-work-harder-to-rig-the-game.html
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