The end of democracy doesn't always require an insurrection

There's a slow motion coup against majority rule being carried out in this country, if we look around.

Here's Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive Democratic political consultant, opining on Twitter: 

GOP learned two lessons from 2020: it was too easy for people of color to vote and too hard for them to sabotage the election. They’ve taken concrete steps to “fix” both and we are still pretending they’re a political party.

From the other end of some spectrum, here's Charlie Sykes, the longtime conservative Wisconsin talkshow host who now helms the Never-Trumper publication the Bulwark:

"If people believe there is an existential threat to democracy, then they should act like it. The Justice Dept. should act like it, the Congress should act like it, the administration should act like it, and to date I don't think that they have."

It was good to see the Washington Post taking seriously the ground level efforts of Republicans to corrupt and take over the local machinery of elections in contested states: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges.

In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged.

In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors.

And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices.

A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections.

Heather Cox Richardson offers a clear summary of the Freedom to Vote Act now hanging fire in the Senate.

The Freedom to Vote Act would standardize elections and make it easier to register and vote, and it would overturn the laws passed since January 2020 by Republican-dominated legislatures to replace nonpartisan election officials with partisans. It would also end partisan gerrymandering, stopping the extraordinary maps Republican-dominated states are creating to give themselves commanding majorities of their states’ legislatures and Congressional delegations regardless of what the voters want. 

Protection of our elections is imperative as Trump and the Republican radicals in Republican-dominated states are cementing their hold on election systems, making it virtually impossible for Democrats to win.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, overriding state election laws. Congress can do this. Even West Virginia's erratic Senator Joe Manchin is more or less on board with this; he negotiated it. The lone holdout, who must vote for it to enable the Democrats in the Senate to pass it, is Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema who seems to have sold her soul to conservative donors. Her devotion to maintaining the undemocratic filibuster rule which clogs up the Senate could doom our democracy.

Experience in working elections has shown me that determined people can overcome a lot of election hurdles to get out to vote. It was inspiring to speak with Georgians while phone banking last December in the run-off races which gave the Democrats their razor thin majority in the Senate. These elderly African American women (the people who answered the phones were mostly women) knew they were going to vote come Hell or High Water. Turning them out was only the easiest part of our mission: we worked to turn them into organizers who would make sure every member of their families was going to the polls. Obstacles like long lines and bans on handing out water to the voters waiting in those lines weren't going to stop them. They expected the system to try to keep them from voting and they weren't about to be stopped by any interference.

But if the systems that administer and tally votes are corrupted, it won't matter who got the most votes. Helping people find their way to the polls won't matter. That's the shape of the GOPers' slow motion coup: they can't win a nationwide majority contest when people are paying attention. Contemporary Republicans cower in fear of an aggressive racist demagogue who thrives on division and hate and wants to use the U.S. government to enrich himself and his family. Many GOPers have become imitators. If U.S. democracy goes down this way, it will be a sad and even globally disastrous end.