Brace yourself, Bridget.
Actually, that’s an old joke about Irish foreplay, but it can be used as a warning to be prepared for something shocking.
So here goes.
I think we may be getting close to the time we will have to abolish the Republican Party if we want to preserve American Democracy.
No shit, Mike?
No shit, imaginary editor.
We can certainly argue the merits of a two-party system, but if you have a two-party system, there are certain things on which the parties have to agree.
- The opposition party is your adversary, not your enemy.
- Both parties have a right, actually an obligation, to make their case to the voters.
- Both parties have a right to cast their votes without interference from each other.
- Voters have a right to have their votes counted accurately.
- The candidates with the most votes must be declared the winners.
Of course there is an exception to No. 5. The Electoral College can be won by the candidate who doesn’t get the most votes, but the candidate who wins each state gets that state’s electoral votes.
That doesn’t work well for the party of Donald Trump. Republicans have won the popular vote in exactly one of the last eight presidential elections, and it has been 49 years since a Republican not named Bush or Reagan won the popular vote.
So Republican states which are turning purple on the way to blue have become a big problem for them.
I live in one of those states, a state that delivered a stunning victory to Joe Biden and took away two Republican Senate seats.
How did that happen? It happened because hundreds of thousands of voters — most of them black — voted for the first time. Some waited in line eight or 10 hours just to cast their ballots.
We should be cheering people like that. They’re buying into the system.
But both here in Georgia and in other purplish states, Republicans want to make it harder for them to vote.
Republicans want them to know that things haven’t changed all that much. People like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) want them to understand that if you’re not white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, you’re second-rate.
Greene is small potatoes, as is Matt Gaetz (R-Pedo). Ted Cruz (R-Cancun) and Josh Hawley (R-Insurrection) ranks a little higher, but only because senators outweigh representatives.
Without Trump, though, they’re all insignificant. But put Trump at the head of it and you’ve got a movement controlled and used by a sociopath. He will do anything to win, because rules are for other people. In the wake of the last election, he said without evidence that he had actually won Georgia (among other states) and they had been stolen from him.
So now the Trumpublicans in numerous states are passing laws that will turn our system into a joke. Laws that allow the state legislature to overturn election results if they see fit. Laws that would have allowed Georgians to award their state’s 16 electoral votes to Trump just because they wanted to.
Imagine that.
Imagine Biden winning by 7 million votes and carrying the Electoral College too. Then imagine a few state legislatures overturning their states’ votes for Biden so that Trump wins.
Guess what.
America’s over.
Better start thinking about what to do with the Republicans before it’s too late.
Maybe start by figuring out how many of them in the Senate are still Americans.
Then work from there.