Minority Government — The Republican Advantage (Part II)

(Continued from post of October 28, 2022)

Hardball Politics and the Supreme Court

Despite the facts that no Republican president has won a popular majority since 2004 and Republican senators have not represented a majority of Americans since 1996, Republicans have appointed six of the nine current Supreme Court justices.  From 2017 to 2020 Donald Trump who lost the popular vote in 2016 appointed three justices who were confirmed by Republican senators who represented less than 45% of the American population.

In February 2016, during the last year of Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow the Senate to consider any appointment to the Court, claiming the appointment should await whomever was elected president ten months later, thus ultimately stealing the Democratic appointment, giving it to Republican Donald Trump who won the November 2016 election and subsequently nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was quickly confirmed by the Republican Senate.  Although McConnell’s action was technically constitutional, it was unique in American history and obviously went beyond the Senate’s responsibility to “advise and consent” on appointments.

When liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in mid-September of 2020, McConnell had no such qualms about awaiting the new president, rushing the confirmation of conservative Amy Coney Barrett through in less than thirty-six days, finishing just a week before the election of Democrat Joe Biden.

The minority party has firm control of the Supreme Court, most likely for a generation.

Statehouses Lock In Electoral Control

Since the “disputed” 2020 election, Republican controlled statehouses have implemented a raft of new laws that would make voting more difficult and other laws that take away control of the electoral process from traditional, nonpartisan, actors and give it to Republican partisans — setting up the potential for the Republican Party to control the electoral process in disputed elections.

US states have enacted more than thirty new voting restrictions since 2020, from stricter voter ID requirements to limits on mail-in voting.  Seven states have enacted laws that facilitated the de-listing of voters, without necessarily notifying the voter.  Twenty-five states have enacted laws that shifted power away from traditional election managers and, in many cases, ceded control to partisan actors.  All of these changes have been made in the name of election security, but it is important to remember that there is no evidence of significant election insecurity … prior to these laws that will now be in effect for next week’s mid-term election.

There is much debate about the actual impact of these legal changes (see here and here). What is not in debate from any except partisan election deniers, is that these laws are unnecessary and likely destructive to our democracy.

Minority Government Is Locked In

The Republican advantage is currently baked into the Constitution.  Extreme gerrymandering and hardball politics have made it worse, and the lies of the 2020 election fraud are cementing it ever more deeply.  Absent the collapse of the Republican Party due to Trump’s craziness, Republicans will continue their minority control of government for years.