Democracy: Why it’s in peril
Don’t let the veneer of “sleepy normalcy” fool you, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. “This is a profoundly dangerous moment” for American democracy. One of our two major political parties has become “radicalized,” passing restrictive voting laws in a dozen states so far based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was marred with massive fraud. In Georgia and Texas, Republican legislatures have set up new processes for election results to be overturned. Rabid Trump supporters have been intimidating state election officials with death threats, and in Arizona, they’re conducting a bogus “audit” that the ex-president believes will get him reinstated. Nearly 3 out of 4 Republicans say that President Joe Biden was illegitimately elected. Meanwhile, elected Republicans are “gaslighting” the country, refusing to participate in a commission to investigate the violent attempt to overturn the election on Jan. 6, insisting it’s time to move on. Wake up: Trump was not merely
“an aberration.” Today and in coming years, this country is facing “a crisis.”
Spare us the hysterics, said Rich Lowry in Politico.com. Progressives insist that democracy is dying to justify passing H.R. 1, or the “For the People Act.” The bill is “objectively terrible legislation” that nullifies all state voter ID laws, mandates same-day registration everywhere, and unconstitutionally restricts political spending and redistricting. It offers a “nonsolution to a noncrisis”: Studies have shown that voter ID laws do not depress turnout. “But this is an emergency, norm breakers will tell you,” said David Harsanyi in the New York Post. That’s why they have to kill the filibuster and ram through national election laws that favor Democrats. But if the filibuster dies, what happens when Democrats are again the minority party and the Republicans enact their own sweeping “reforms”? Removing the need for any consensus building in a sharply divided country is a guarantee of even more partisan anger and social unrest.
If Democrats truly want to protect democracy, said Mona Charen in TheBulwark.com, they should forget about the shoddily crafted and doomed For the People Act. Instead, they need to amend the little-noticed Electoral Count Act of 1887, which authorizes state legislatures to appoint their choice of presidential electors in the event of a “failed election.” That’s a ticking time bomb. “It’s not the vote casting, but the vote counting that needs attention. Now.”