We're Seeing What Happens When Republicans Rule Without Popular Support
In its lame-duck session early Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature worked under cover of night to strip the incoming Democratic governor of the power to administer the law.
This attempt to undermine democracy is the inevitable conclusion of the Republican Party governing without a popular mandate, empowered through partisan gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws. Its modus operandi has become quite clear: If you can’t win elections, rig them. If the rules say you can’t do something, change the rules. Then if voters still elect Democrats, take away their power.
The GOP’s ability to get away with this stems from years of Democrats’ underestimating the importance of state politics. And the only realistic way these assaults on our democracy can be repelled is for Democrats to get serious about the most consequential, and overlooked, part of our political system.
Democrats have to stop viewing statehouses as mere tools of federal power, important only to the extent that they have control over gerrymandering, and recognize that they are powerful and important in their own right.
This isn’t the first such power grab to override the will of voters. In fact, Michigan and Wisconsin Republicans are following a playbook carried out in North Carolina two years ago, where the Republican-led General Assembly passed a similar set of measures to reduce the incoming Democratic governor’s power.
The tactics are not only targeted at Democratic statewide officials. They are also designed to undermine democracy itself. In Wisconsin, Republicans passed a bill to make it harder for citizens to get to the polls by reducing early voting — a move that was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge two years ago.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danielsquadron/wisconsin-power-grab-republican-minority-rule