Where Are We Heading?

[RANT]

The opening paragraph…

Do not believe that we are still living in a functioning democracy. We are not. Republicans across this country are doing everything they can to impede, alter and override the power of the personal vote. This strikes at the very heart of democracy, both undermining people’s faith in it and contorting it until it no long resembles what it claims to be.

This article was posted on Facebook by one of our state Senators and she hit the nail  on its head.

Sen. Beth Bye wrote,

“Republican power is increasingly synonymous with white power. The party’s nationalist tendencies are increasingly synonymous with white nationalism.

This group will not willingly cede its power just because demographics predict its downfall and current circumstances demonstrate its weaknesses.

If the Republican Party can’t maintain power in the democracy we have, it will destroy that democracy so that its power can be entrenched by limiting the impact of the vote.”

The New York Times Opinion article goes on to say,

“After hours of mysterious closed-door meetings that went past midnight, the Wisconsin Senate convened at 4:30 on Wednesday morning and passed by one vote a package of bills devised to curb the powers of the incoming Democratic leaders.”

And Wisconsin is not alone. As the The Washington Post reported Monday:

“In Michigan, where Democrats last month won the governor’s mansion as well as the races for attorney general and secretary of state, Republican lawmakers last week introduced measures that would water down the authority of those positions on campaign finance oversight and other legal matters.”

Altering the structure of power in a state to limit the influence of an incoming executive of an opposing party wasn’t something I thought I’d ever see in America, but unfortunately this isn’t even the first time we’ve seen it. This is not the first time Republicans have done it.

The Republican party is corrupt!

As I read some of the comments about this power grab it is frighten, the party loyalists think that this is fantastic in that it will limit the power of those “liberal socialists.” They see no problem with the usurping the will of the voters.

Republican anti-democratic tendencies aren’t limited to the transfer of power. They extend to areas like the widespread efforts to enact voter suppression, from voter ID laws to voter roll purges to shortening early-voting windows to gerrymandering.
[…]
As for gerrymandering, it is “the biggest obstacle to genuine democracy in the United States,” according to Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London.

As Klaas noted in an article in The Washington Post: “While no party is innocent when it comes to gerrymandering, a Washington Post analysis in 2014 found that eight of the ten most gerrymandered districts in the United States were drawn by Republicans.”

It is fact white supremacists are backing the Republican Party and militant groups have said that they would take up arms against any Democrat president.

If the Republican Party can’t maintain power in the democracy we have, it will destroy that democracy so that its power can be entrenched by limiting the impact of the vote.

Don’t look for relief from the courts. Don’t forget that it was the Chief Justice John Roberts Court that overturned parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Fascism has arrived here in the U.S.

And the people voted it in.

[/RANT]