WILL THE DEMOCRATS WAKE UP IN TIME?

WHEN WILL THE DEMOCRATS WAKE UP

Quoting from yesterday: “Rachel Bitecofer, a Ph.D. polling analyst and Democratic political strategist, considers the dominant strategy for 2022 and beyond: demonizing the Republican brand. ‘The only strategy that works, is to make change a scary concept for the electorate. It has to be democracy versus autocracy.’”

Since the Chardonnay-swilling, Brie-chomping Volvo drivers leading the Dimocratic Party don’t want to follow Dr. Bitecofer’s good advice, I will.

This is straight, no chaser, no Rachel-like winding road to get to the point:

The Republican structural advantage in our constitutional system of electoral organization and administration is so large that in 2024 Donald Trump may well be able to win the presidency without resorting to extra-legal means. We may well elect our aspiring authoritarian strongman without a constitutional crisis.

Go back and read that again. That is the crisis we face.

Since Reagan, Democrats have won around 51% of the popular vote every year except when Poppy Bush ran in 1988. Because of Gerrymandering, because of the way the Constitution apportions political power between states - favoring rural over urban - if the party does that well in November, Mitch McConnell will have 52-seat Republican majority in the Senate next January 3. If the Democrats do that in 2024, the Republicans will have a very good chance of taking the White House, and an almost-certain minimum 58-seat Senate majority, and a House majority by 60 seats.

Here is a question: Let’s pretend it’s January 2025. Biden won reelection last November with an improved 52 percent of the vote and Republicans hold “only” a 53-47 Senate majority. In February, Clarence Thomas dies of a heart attack.

Do you think Mitch McConnell would allow a vote on a Biden nominee?

Ten years before, in 2015, it would have seemed silly to suggest Republicans would refuse to vote on a court nominee in the year before a presidential election. Three years ago it would have seemed silly to say that Republicans might refuse to vote on a nominee two years before a presidential election.

Because of demographics, the political organization of the country, and the increasing polarization of Red and Blue states, Republicans are looking at the very solid possibility of a semi-permanent Senate majority.

Why would they vote on a nominee from any Democratic president? Ever? Why wouldn’t they leave the seat open until they get a Republican president? Who would stop them?

The only way for Democrats to have avoided this situation was for them to have given the District of Columbia statehood. That foundered on the opposition of Joe Manchin, and the Democrats went in a different direction. They focused on passing a middle-class tax credit to help working families and a bipartisan infrastructure bill supported by 19 Republican senators. That’s the kind of normal, moderate, non-ideological, kitchen-table accomplishments people always say they want from government. Thanks to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, there was no chance of passing the Build Back Better bill that would have transformed things and given all kinds of people reason to re-think their votes in 2022 and 2024. But that didn’t happen.

And now, for all the work they have done, the Democrat’s reward is very likely going to be a Republican House, and a permanent Republican Senate.

And the only way to avoid that is to wake people up to what exactly this outcome will mean in their lives.

The only way to avoid that is to scare the hell out of people.

Here goes:

Let’s start with what the history of how American women lost their reproductive rights will look like when it is written.

In retrospect, the bill-signing that took place in Oklahoma yesterday will be seen as one of the key moments when the shrinking window of possibility that the Supreme Court might hold back from overturning Roe closed forever. The bill, outlawing almost all abortions in the state, is as clearly unconstitutional as it would be for the state to criminalize Judaism or criticism of the president. But this bill highlights impotence of Democrats in the face of the Republican assault on women’s fundamental rights.

By June, the court will issue its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, concerning the Stare of Mississippi’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

After the court announced they would take this case, and based on commentary by the justices, many initially believed the court would find some clever way to undermine abortion without an explicit overturning of Roe, since the six-conservative majority would see how politically volatile such a decision would be, and the risks it would create for the Republican Party. The incremental conservative wing led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Would prevail over the fire eaters, led by Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

But now, many court observers no longer think that’s the likely result. This is not due to anything the justices have said or done, but because of what Republican state legislatures are doing. The new law in Oklahoma and the other outright bans coming from these legislatures will force the court’s hand. A decision that stops short of overturning Roe only works if these Republican- controlled legislatures played .

But, if the court only issues some clever undermining of Roe, Oklahoma’s ban, or another like it, will be challenged, and the court will have to rule on it. Faced with ruling on a complete ban such as this, there would be no half-steps to take. The court would have to decide the fundamental question: women have a right to abortions, or they don’t. The court’s conservative majority clearly thinks they don’t. This is how the Supreme Court is “political;” both the court and its rulings exist in a political context, and can be influenced and shaped by other political actors.

Republicans across the country are fired up. They don’t want to wait for the court to give them what they want,and they’re willing to force it to do so.

I hate to say this, but right now there’s little reason to think the response of Democrats will be anything but weak and ineffectual. In blue states, the Democrats are passing laws to enhance and secure abortion access. That’s it.

National Democrats could make this war on women’s rights a mobilizing issue for the midterm elections, but instead they’re spending their time debating how best to focus on “kitchen table issues” and politely ask Republicans not to hit them too hard. Nancy Pelosi is pushing this strategy hard and opposing those who are willing to go find the fire alarm and pull it.

For the first time since 1974, I think she is wrong. The Democratic leaders in Congress and the States are wrong. The Biden White House is wrong. And they’re going to get their asses kicked for this mistake.

While the Democrats sit behind the Maginot Line defenses they’re building back home, the Republicans are organizing their panzer divisions and clearing the roads through the Ardennes Forest. And they’re not doing anything to hide it.

Republicans know that even in the face of the Court’s continuing assault on fundamental rights, Democrats still don’t seem to care much about the future of the court; certainly they care less about it than do Republicans, as was seen in 2016 when anti-Hillary voters dismissed warnings about court nominations as a reason to vote for her. Thus, Mitch McConnell can make it crystal clear that Republicans will never again allow a Democratic president to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, and almost no one takes notice, and if they do, they’re dismissed with “that’s just politics.”

Too many senior Democratic leaders look at their contemporary opponents with as much understanding of the threat as did the French Generals who built the original Maginot Line and stared uncomprehendingly at the tanks the Wehrmacht was parading in German cities before the Second World War. When the Germans came through the “impassable” Ardennes and crossed the Meuse River at Sedan, while the main French Army sat in their fortifications, the fall of France only took six weeks.

I’m one who fears that the court will overturn Roe this summer, consigning the women unfortunate enough to live in red states to a grim future; my partner was a Friend of Jane before 1972. We both old enough to have reason to remember how bad it was in The Time Before.

If all that Democrats do when that happens is issue some stern press releases about it, and then go back to pointing at their decision to let shitty gas continue to be sold in the summer time to save people ten cents a gallon at the pump for gas that reduces mileage ten percent, and think that shows how they care about what is happening in the country, they’ll be obliterated in November. They will lose the House, and Senate forever. And they’ll point at people like me, and tell themselves it was all our fault.

More and more, I know how Billy Wilder felt 90 years ago.

This future is by no means a certainty. When the death of Roe is not a future possibility but a recent event, Democrats might feel the appropriate anger and rise up in response. It took the shock of the photos from Bucha to produce a real mobilization to support Ukraine.

But if we wait till then, conservatives aren’t just going to declare victory and stop. They’ll come for birth control next. When that happens, will Democrats finally act like it’s the emergency it is, before it happens? That six-seat majority at the court is ready to dismantle post-1954 America.

All of it.

For the Right, 1954 was when everything went downhill. They’ve hated the rulings since - ending apartheid, the guarantee of a right to an attorney, protection against self-incrimination, allowing race as one of many factors to correct historical inequities in higher education, the crystallization of the right of privacy in everything from birth control to gay marriage.

They’re coming for all of it. All. Of. It.

Throw in constricting the federal government’s ability to act through regulation or executive orders, gun control, racial equity and immigration.

Now you see why they’ve fought a 60 year war to regain control of the Supreme Court.

And they think they’re going to start consolidating that victory the first week of June.

The Right has used every device at their disposal to impose minority rule: the electoral college, the filibuster, lifetime Supreme Court appointees handpicked by presidents elected without a popular-vote majority, and the Senate. They openly threaten violence and enthusiastically embrace an amoral politics in which truth is an inconvenience and anything goes to hold power.

Unfortunately, that can easily run over people who think the war will be decided according to the rules. The Wehrmacht defeated the strongest army in Europe in 1940 by rewriting the rules and thumbing their nose at the people who couldn’t understand there were new rules.

The Right thinks its moment has arrived. Their legislatures throw up barriers to voting and vote to criminalize abortion, expecting that the six right-wing justices will decide it’s all legal.

Despite the belief of the Volvo drivers that all will be OK, that blue states will adapt to satisfy progressives and red states will do the same for the MAGA Right, such a conclusion is a moral abomination - that geography should determine fundamental rights.

Democrats may have an enthusiasm problem heading into this year’s midterms, but they should consider that a lot of Americans - including those who live in those “blue jewels” in red states - do not want to go back 60 years.

Pelosi and the other “French Generals” be damned, if necessary.

Democrats MUST push the fire alarm. They MUST contrast the party with the Republicans:

Forward vs. backward.

Progress vs. chaos.

Respect vs. bullying.

Freedom vs. theocracy.

“Which America do YOU want to live in?” MUST be the defining question for the upcoming election.

And those to follow.

Pull. The. Alarm.

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