The GOP's End Runs Around Democracy

Taking their cue from Donald Trump, Republicans around the country are using increasingly brazen anti-democratic tactics to hold onto power.

Closeup of someone ripping up The United States of America Constitution. Photo Credit: Getty.

On the one hand, the modern Republican Party resembles a fish flopping on a dock, desperately gasping for breath. On the other, it remains a mainstream political party, garnering majority support in many states and even rendering Donald Trump competitive in a national presidential race.

How should we reconcile these two realities? The party continues to alienate young voters and women voters with its out-of-touch and draconian social policies while doubling down on anti-democratic efforts and openly embracing radicalism. They do this knowing that the writing is on the wall. They see the demographic tsunami coming their way. They know they can’t win on the issues or with a fair fight at the ballot box. And this is precisely why they implement voter suppression measures targeting Democratic voters and gerrymander themselves into outsized majorities.

But that’s not the full extent of their anti-democratic tactics. In recent years, they have grown more brazen and more creative in their efforts to maintain power at all costs, often by making end runs around democracy, the courts, and those pesky voters.

Remember when the Republican Party brand was all about freedom? Or democracy? Hell, they used to be rah rah Amurica! Well, those values have all but gone out the window in the interest of pursuing (and maintaining) power. 

In today’s piece, I’ll explore the Republican attempt to oust duly appointed and elected officials in Wisconsin, their efforts to change a key voting threshold in the middle of the game in Ohio, and their brazen defiance of the Supreme Court in Alabama. Seen separately, these are attacks upon the system and rule of law in each state. But viewed together, they are evidence of powerful anti-democratic forces that have come to define the modern MAGA GOP.

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Republicans’ Wisconsin Hail Mary

In Wisconsin, the Republican-led state senate just voted to oust the state’s nonpartisan election administrator, Meagan Wolfe, who had been confirmed by the same body as recently as 2019. The rationale: voters’ supposed distrust in the elections after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, distrust that the GOP itself sowed.

As Wolfe’s fate is litigated in the courts and she vows to hold onto her position, the Republican-led state legislature has now initiated a move to impeach the newly elected Democratic state Supreme Court Justice, Janet Protasiewicz, before she has even heard a case. Her crime? Accepting Democratic campaign donations and calling the Wisconsin district lines “rigged” when she is likely to hear a case challenging those district lines on the court.

In an awkward twist, one of the former state Supreme Court justices appointed to consider the Republican impeachment plan himself accepted Republican campaign donations when he was on the court. 

Whoops!

Even if Republicans are not able to remove Justice Protasiewicz from the court through a two-thirds vote of the state senate, where they hold a supermajority, they may be able to place her in legal limbo by simply delaying a senate vote, thus preventing her from hearing any cases. 

Republicans are most concerned with two matters in particular: overturning the 1849 anti-abortion law that kicked in after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and a challenge to Republicans’ gerrymandered district lines.

To the Wisconsin GOP, Justice Protasiewicz’s 11-point win at the ballot is completely irrelevant. They believe they know best and will do all they can to impose their rule on the state, regardless of the will of the voters.

Changing The Rules In The Middle Of The Game In Ohio

Considering how abortion rights ballot measures have gone for Republicans, even in red states, ever since Trump’s radical Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, Ohio Republicans were understandably nervous once a ballot referendum codifying Roe into the state constitution qualified for the ballot this November.

So to try to torpedo the initiative’s chances, Republicans snuck another referendum onto the ballot in the middle of August: Issue 1. That measure sought to try to change the rules mid-game so that the threshold for passage of ballot measures would shift from a simple majority to a supermajority requirement of 60% in order to make it harder to pass the pro-Roe constitutional amendment.

Well, that backfired spectacularly when voters resoundingly rejected Issue 1 by a 57%-43% margin. Republicans’ attempt to remake the voting rules inspired an unprecedented turnout of more than 3 million voters in a summer off-year election. That represented more than five times the turnout in August 2022, and almost double the turnout in primary elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022.

That strong anti-Issue 1 vote is widely seen as a proxy for the very ballot measure Republicans were trying to thwart. Which is why Republicans didn’t stop there. The Ohio Ballot Board led by the state’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose—who is also running for Senate against Sherrod Brown—did its best to confuse voters with the wording of the summary of November’s ballot measure. 

According to Lauren Blauvelt, spokesperson for Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights:

“The ballot board’s members adopted politicized, distorted language for the amendment, exploiting their authority in a last-ditch effort to deceive and confuse Ohio voters ahead of the November vote on reproductive freedom.”

For instance, the right-wing board replaced “fetus” with “unborn child” and failed to mention the fact that the ballot measure also protects access to contraception and fertility treatments.

These are tactics used by people who know they are losing and have the utmost contempt for the voters they claim to serve.

Alabama’s Defiance Of The Supreme Court

In 2021, following the 2020 census, Alabama Republicans redrew district maps so that there would only be one majority Black district instead of two in Alabama, disenfranchising millions out of their community’s prior representation in Congress. Voting rights advocates and affected citizens challenged the new map, and a panel of three federal district court judges, including two Trump appointees, struck it down. Specifically, the panel found the map violative of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and ordered a new map drawn with a second Black opportunity district, with a majority or close to a majority African American electorate.

Defendants appealed, and that case made it up to the Supreme Court, where, in a 5-4 ruling, the Court upheld the core principles of, and the two minority opportunity districts created under, the Voting Rights Act, affirming the ruling of the district court panel.

But Alabama Republicans didn’t care. Defying the direct order of the district court, which the Supreme Court had affirmed, they created a new map that still had only one majority Black district, with a second district that had only 39.9% Black voters, claiming that the new map should be determined not by the court’s order but by new standards and a new law the state legislature passed.

As Judge Terry Moorer stated bluntly to Republicans leading the charge:

“What I hear you saying is that the state of Alabama deliberately ignored our instruction to draw two majority-Black districts or one where a minority candidate could be chosen.”

This new map was once again thrown out by the three-judge panel, this time ordered to be redrawn by an independent special master. 

The ruling contained this remarkable takedown of the Republican legislature:

We are disturbed by the evidence that the State delayed remedial proceedings but ultimately did not even nurture the ambition to provide the required remedy. And we are struck by the extraordinary circumstance we face. We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature — faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district — responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district. The law requires the creation of an additional district that affords Black Alabamians, like everyone else, a fair and reasonable opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. The 2023 Plan plainly fails to do so.

The state has once again appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled against them only this past June. For Alabama Republicans, it seems, this fight is no longer about winning on the merits, but rather dragging out the process as long as they can so they can maintain the current unlawful lines for the 2024 election in hopes of helping the Republican Party maintain its majority.

Ohio Republicans took a similar tack, simply ignoring their state Supreme Court’s mandates to redraw district lines. They successfully ran out the clock, ensuring unlawful maps will remain in place for the 2024 election. 

According to Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, this may actually be a win for Democrats in the longer term, but it is certainly a loss for the guardrails of our democracy and the rule of law, which Republicans around the country continue to try to methodically dismantle.

Why Are Republicans Feeling So Emboldened?

There are at least two reasons Republicans are moving so aggressively in this moment to run afoul of democratic norms in pursuit of power at all costs. The first mistakes their position as one of strength, and the other utterly reveals their great weakness.

The short-term political incentives for anti-democratic Republicans are crystal clear. Over and over, they have witnessed their Dear Leader Donald Trump only grow in strength among his voting base—and still remain viable in a general election—the more he has flouted basic democratic conventions. 

With each indictment, Trump’s poll numbers in the GOP primary have risen. With each revelation about Trump’s criminality, with each lie-ridden interview he gives, with each judicial order he ignores, he at best gains in strength among Republicans and at worst loses no ground nationally, holding Biden to a tie.

If Donald Trump can incite an insurrection, be impeached twice and indicted four times, and still remain standing strong, why would his fellow Republicans follow any basic norms of the rule of law that have traditionally held our democracy together?

But this show of strength misreads the political moment, and badly. Even as Republicans see a model for their bad behavior in Trump, their behavior is causing massive pushback and flashing warning signs of their party’s underlying weakness.

Ever since The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, Democrats have overperformed in election after election. The biggest example, of course, was last year’s midterm elections in which Democrats held Republicans, against all odds, to a mere 5-seat majority and grew their majority in the Senate.

This has given Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the House very little room to maneuver. We are seeing the price he is paying every day as his far-right flank threatens to oust him, even as he hands them the impeachment inquiry they so desperately demanded.

But the Democratic overperformance didn’t stop with last year’s midterms. It continued through Janet Protozawicz’s 11-point win in April to flip Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court from conservative to liberal, and to Ohio’s 17-point victory preventing Republicans from rewriting the rules of ballot initiatives this past summer.

And the trend continued unabated this week, as Democrats kept hold of a key swing seat in Pennsylvania’s state legislature to keep bare control of the chamber.

And in New Hampshire, Democrats flipped a state house seat, putting them just one seat away from taking over the majority in the chamber. Democrat Hal Rafter won by 12 points in a district Trump won in both 2016 and 2020.

As ABC News’ Nathaniel Rakich noted, the district is 6 points more Republican than the nation as a whole, which makes Rafter’s 12-point win a Democratic overperformance of 18 points.

In fact, according to Rakich, looking at the results of all 2023 special elections from January through September, Democrats have overperformed by an average of 11 points across all districts.

For Rakich, this spells a potential blue wave next year:

That’s more than just an impressive streak — it’s a potential sign of a Democratic wave election in 2024. In each of the past three election cycles, a party’s average overperformance in all special elections in a given cycle has been a close match for the eventual House popular vote in the eventual general election…

The last time Democrats performed this well in special elections was ahead of the 2008 election in which Democrats won the House popular vote by 7 percent and added 21 seats to their majority.

It’s widely accepted that this overperformance by Democrats is due in large part to the overreach of the Trump-stacked Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and subsequent Republican efforts around the country to restrict or downright outlaw abortion care. This has mobilized Democratic constituencies, particularly young people and women, and as much as Republicans wish it would, it shows no signs of stopping.

So, yes, as Republicans continue to flop on the dock desperately gasping for breath, they are going to continue to try every maneuver they can think of to hold onto power.

Until the people finally take it away.