Good Trouble

“Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”

— John Lewis

There is an autocrats play book. History is full of examples of successes and failures. Those that succeed most often follow a step-by-step process that creates an insidious stream of events that lead to a strongman in power. First, condone violence. “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Second, do not accept election results. “Stop the steal!” Then the violence becomes political violence. “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Then it becomes political violence to overturn lost elections. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol… because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” In my view, the insurrection on 6 January is only the beginning.

A not so fun fact: Since 1 January 2021 there have been about 70 bomb threats on Capitol Hill. Just another day at the office.

With or without Congress taking action to normalize our elections across all fifty states, there will be more violent political activity. Currently Congress is working to enfranchise all eligible voters, thus overturning the many state voting laws that limit voting and give power to Republican controlled entities to overturn any election that their candidate does not win. With the passage of a national voting law, we will survive the attempted coups and remain a democratic Republic. Without such laws, I fear we will not survive as a democracy.

While voting laws have been the purview of state legislatures, there is ample precedent for national standards. In addition, Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, commonly known as the “elections clause,” and as modified by the 17th and 20th Amendments, gives Congress the power to “at any time by Law make or alter such regulations” passed by individual states.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was passed by the House in 2020 but not by the Senate and has since been reintroduced. It is designed to reinstate provisions of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 to over ride a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the core elements of the VRA.

A second bill called the Freedom to Vote Act was an attempt by Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) to create a compromise bill, stripped of some its more controversial elements, that could gain ten Republican votes to over ride the filibuster of the For the People Act already passed by the House. After a summer’s worth of work and assurances from Senator Manchin that he could find some moderate Republicans in favor of the bill, not one Republican voted for over riding a filibuster to bring it to the floor for discussion. For discussion. They will not even talk about voting rights in the Senate, much less vote to protect those rights.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R?-KY) is counting on Senator Manchin to effectively do his dirty work as Mr. Manchin vociferously proclaims that he will do nothing to eliminate the filibuster for voting rights. An outdated Senate rule is apparently more important than allowing people to vote and to maintain the integrity of election results.

Thus, phase one of the Republicans’ attack on democracy continues without interruption.

This leads me to the second phase of that plan. The demonstrations — occasionally violent but with violence always as an implied threat — over masks, Covid-19 vaccines, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). Initially, I could not fully grasp what the problem might be. Why such vehement over reaction? So much of our common good derives from mandatory actions — seat belts, smoking, drinking and driving, wearing shirts and shoes in restaurants, and other required vaccines, for example — to protect the individual and the community at large. People do not protest those requirements, so why these? Now I am beginning to get it. The issues are merely excuses for most protesters, not core beliefs. To put it in simple terms, they are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. The issues themselves are not relevant. They are just mad. Nearly any issue will do, and in fact the issues do change over time and depend on the circumstance. These issues are merely symbols for pushing back on what they see as a dominant federal government that is mandating change. Be it LGBTQ issues, same sex marriage, immigration, an increasingly diverse nation, and on and on. The white, male, Christian dominated society that they believe is the true essence of our American national identity is changing. And they will not go quietly into that new society.

That is the genius of Trumpism. Tap into the rage, the fear and the sense of loss and turn it into power.

As a result, we are now seeing 6 Januarys across the country at school board meetings, county council meetings and other local seats of community engagement. The threats, intimidation and violence against local elected officials and their families are a manifestation of Trumpism and the autocratic methods of using violence as the means to achieve political ends. If they can remove the officials that are the focus of their ire, or better yet, intimidate them into quitting, then they can replace them with people that will do their bidding. Please do not misinterpret my comments to mean that I object to legitimate protest, I do not. I understand that such protests can get heated at times. What I am talking about is a lot more than that. When people show up at local officials homes, burn slogans into their grass, brandish weapons outside their windows, and conduct other such documented “protests,” then we are in an entirely different world.

Perhaps the people using such tactics are a tiny minority of the population, but the impact that they have is real and significant. History tells us that be it Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, or nearly any country where autocrats now rule, they were in the minority until they seized control. Autocratic parties generally are a minority party when they seize power. That explains the tactics to suppress the vote, to intimidate those that do not support them, and to use violence to refute and change election results.

I have lost faith in our elected officials in Congress. The Democrats continue with “regular order” and debates within the party that create the appearance that they cannot get their act together. When faced with direct threats to our democracy they act like wimps in the face of these challenges choosing to honor arcane rules of the Senate that do not have a basis in law or the Constitution rather than to support and defend the Constitution. Republicans are the party of “no!” I do not believe that they stand for anything. Their only goal is to march in lock step to use Trump and his followers to regain power. They are using those arcane rules — especially in the Senate — to stop anything and everything put forward by President Biden or his party. They do not just vote against it, they filibuster almost everything, making it nearly impossible in the current environment to do anything, even if as many as nine Republican Senators support it (although most times the total number of Republican votes for something is zero).

We already are a minority rule country. For example, Senators from 21 mostly small or rural states representing less than a quarter of the total population of the country, can stop any legislation of which they do not approve. Put another way, Senators from 15 small states represent 38 million people while the Senators from one state (California) represent 40 million citizens.

We now have an ex-president roaming the country continuing to claim that he is the real president. Recent polls suggest that more and more people believe him. One poll shows that 66 percent of Republican voters and 18 percent of Independent voters believe that the election was “stolen” from the ex-president. 53 percent of Republicans in another recent poll believe that the ex-president is the “true president.” That does not bode well for a democracy. Propaganda works. Tell a lie enough times and people start to believe it. Unfortunately, history provides countless examples.

Most threatening, and appalling, is that the Sedition Caucus (those that voted against certifying Joe Biden as the 46th president) in Congress is growing stronger. New candidates recruited to run as Republicans in the 2022 election are nearly universally required to continue to vociferously support the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democrats.

(Timeout. It continues to baffle me that to date, no one can explain why there is no evidence of any widespread fraud, ballot manipulation, Jewish-Italian lasers from space or any other discrepancy in the voting process despite nearly countless challenges in court, state audits, faux audits and every other endeavor known to mankind to find a problem. The usual answer is to blow off the lack of evidence as evidence itself. In other words, the Democrats and the thousands of poll workers of both parties required to do what is alleged were so clever, that they left no trace of evidence behind. Also unanswered is why on the same ballots, only the presidential votes were allegedly tampered with but not the hundreds or thousands of other offices voted on during the same election?)

In a country where vigilantes are legitimized by the Supreme Court, Congressional subpoenas are routinely ignored without consequence, people actively attempt to overthrow the government and overturn elections, and the evidence continues to mount that a sitting president tried to use the power of the federal government to remain in office after losing an election, there is real evidence that our way of life is being directly challenged. We are in big trouble.

Where does it stop?

The first and most important step is for Congress to pass legislation to standardize national elections and to ensure that all eligible voters have the opportunity to cast a ballot and that those ballots mean something. The results cannot be overturned by one party that is not happy with the result. Period. Nothing else matters. It is job one and the Democrats need to make it happen. Now. Do your damn jobs and pass the voting rights legislation.

Do not sit by. Get into some good trouble. Elections matter.