Conservatives are always seeking ways to (a) defund the government and its services and (b) push their own cultural values onto others. One Texas state representative found a way to try doing both.
Representative Bryan Slaton has filed a bill to roll back 100 percent of property taxes for heterosexual married couples with 10 children.
The legislation calls for property tax relief by increments of 10 percent for each child, starting with married couples with four “qualifying children” receiving a 40 percent credit, those with five receiving a 50 percent credit, and so on. (Couples with three children or fewer do not qualify for the credit.)
If a “qualifying married couple” has 10 or more “qualifying children,” they would receive a 100 percent credit off their property taxes.
Language in the bill defines a “qualifying child” to be a “natural child of both spouses of a qualifying married couple born after the date on which the qualifying married couple married,” or an adopted child of one or both spouses, adopted after the couple was married.
And what constitutes a “qualifying married couple,” you may ask? Well, it “means a man and a woman who are legally married to each other, neither of whom have ever been divorced.”
“With this bill, Texas will start saying to couples: ‘Get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply,’” Slaton said in a statement.
The bill may not be surprising coming from Slaton. The Houston Press reports that the Texas representative, a former minister, has proposed banning minors from all drag events and has also dedicated much of his time in government to trying to attach various anti-LGBTQ amendments to completely unrelated legislative packages.
Slaton’s former intern Jake Neidert is a self-described Christian nationalist who has menacingly called for trans people to be “publicly executed.” The vicious figure went on to work as legislative director for Representative Tony Tinderholt, Slaton’s ally in many of his anti-LGBTQ crusades.
So, whether or not this specific bill gets awfully far, rest assured its author is heavily active in working to advance a radical fundamentalist agenda on Texans.
This is a difficult moment for the American republic. More than a million Americans died in the Covid-19 pandemic. Former President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol two years ago in a violent and deadly coup attempt; he himself may soon face charges for trying to subvert the election that he lost in 2020. Our political divides seem more intractable now than at any other time in living memory.
In this grim hour, the nation naturally turns to one of its leading political thinkers: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her proposed solution is simple. “We need a national divorce,” she wrote on Twitter on February 20. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the [Democrats’] traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”
Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.
Greene’s call, however, is not a cure for the disease in our body politic but a symptom of it. Every call for the United States to break apart or divide itself based on the political factions of the moment are built on a fantasy. In that fantasy, the proponents get to live in a world where everything they want comes true, and the perceived opponents finally get the self-inflicted comeuppance that they and their ideas deserve. Greene’s vision is not just about realizing conservative policy ideas—it is an authoritarian rejection of democratic government itself.
Greene is hardly the first person to call for a “national divorce.” (Five years ago, a contributor to this magazine regrettably called for a “Bluexit.”) The term is most often used as a sanitized version of secessionism, one that implies—without guaranteeing—a more peaceful outcome than the last attempt in 1860. In recent years, a vocal sect of conservative pundits has been “predicting” that another civil war is on the horizon because of the country’s deep political divides. I say “predicting” because some of these commentaries read less like urgent warnings to prevent a civil war and more like thinly veiled wish-casting for one to occur. After all, as these pundits boast from time to time, they’re the side with all the guns.
That context means it’s not surprising that most people initially took “separate by red states and blue states” to mean that Greene wanted Republican-led states to secede from the Union. The following day, however, Greene explained in a series of Twitter posts that she had something else in mind. A national divorce, in her view, is “not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union.” That sounds like federalism, a thing that already exists, but apparently she has something more extreme in mind.
Greene said that she thought the two sides of American politics had reached the point of “irreconcilable differences” on a variety of topics. “I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs,” Greene explained.
Some of her arguments were rooted in fiscal policy, though they were not clearly explained. She criticized both sides of the political spectrum for increasing the national debt to what she saw as an unsustainable level. “A national divorce would require a much smaller federal government with more power given to the states,” she claimed. “Hence, we would solve our debt and spending problems immediately.” What exactly would happen to the existing $34 trillion debt is unclear.
But Greene’s vision largely pertains to social issues. If implemented, her plan would result in red states with “varying degrees of more traditional public education, charter schools, homeschooling, technical training, and college and universities” and blue states with “LGBTQ indoctrinating teachers” and “government controlled gender transition schools.” Red states would “bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance,” while blue states would “likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies like the Trans flag and BLM.”
“Perhaps some blue states would even likely have government funded Antifa communists training schools,” Greene added, almost as an afterthought. “I mean elected Democrats already support Antifa, so why not.”
The rest of her Twitter thread is a caricature of the modern political divide. After a national divorce, Greene claimed, red states would be able to ban transgender people from everyday life, use fossil fuels whenever possible, throw out ESG requirements for businesses, treat police officers as “heroes” instead of “racists,” secure the border, and hold in-person elections without voter fraud. Blue states could abolish the police, let dead people vote, and eliminate guns and private property.
At times, it seems like she doesn’t even believe her own tale: If the postdivorce blue states all turned Communist, there would be no Walmarts there.
How exactly all of this would happen is unsaid. Greene doesn’t propose an act of Congress or a constitutional amendment that says “red and blue states do whatever they want.” And she emphasizes that the U.S. would technically remain one country under her hazy framework. “Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations would continue,” she wrote. “However in red states, they could have different rules about store product placement on national [stores’] shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes.” At times, it seems like she doesn’t even believe her own tale: If the postdivorce blue states all turned Communist, there would be no Walmarts there.
When I’ve written about calls for secession in the past, such as when Republicans in Texas and Wyoming floated the idea shortly after Biden’s inauguration, I’ve emphasized the practical impossibilities of such a task. Secessionists are also wrong on a moral and civic level, but the economic case is much more demonstrably flawed from recent experience. Brexit should give anyone pause about breaking up existing political and economic unions for transitory political gain. Leaving the European Union helped ossify the United Kingdom’s trajectory into a future of political intransigence, collapsing public services, stagnant wage growth, and periodic food rationing (this week being one of those periods). British gross domestic product growth last year was outpaced by every other major economy in 2022, including sanctions-ravaged Russia.
What matters in Greene’s fantasy is not the prescribed policy outcome she outlines for each side of the policy divide. It’s not worth quibbling with her about what Democrats and liberals actually believe or what Republicans and conservatives really hope to accomplish. The most important takeaway here is her complete rejection of the idea that Americans can resolve their political differences through discussion, persuasion, or compromise. In her preferred outcome, Greene would never have to convince a single voter that her policy ideas are better than her opponents’ or that they would be better off if they elected her. She simply wants to win by default.
A useful window into her anti-democratic thinking came during a media tour this week about her national divorce comments. On his internet show, conservative activist Charlie Kirk asked Greene how red states could “stop” the left from “trying to invade our states or our counties.” Greene replied that red states, in her proposal, could simply “choose … how they allow people to vote in their states.”
She continued, “What I think would be something that some red states could propose is: Well, OK, if Democrat voters choose to flee these blue states where they cannot tolerate the living conditions, they don’t want their children taught these horrible things, and they really change their mind on the types of policies that they support, well once they move to a red state, guess what, maybe you don’t get to vote for five years. You can live there, and you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values that you basically created in the blue states you came from by voting for Democrat leaders and Democrat policies.”
“National divorce,” in other words, is a call for one-party rule. Its proponents hope to abandon all those pesky democratic processes and practices so they can simply impose their policy agenda upon Americans by fiat. Never mind that the states aren’t homogenous, with plenty of Democrats living in the red states and plenty of Republicans living in the blue states. Never mind that the idea of “red states” and “blue states” itself is vague and malleable, as Greene’s own state of Georgia has shown in the last few election cycles.
The idea of breaking apart this country over pronouns or climate change regulations is nonsense. It should not be taken seriously. But Greene’s underlying idea—that all our perceived national problems would go away if we stopped trying to resolve our differences through elections and the democratic process—can’t be ignored. It demonstrates a dangerous and malignant view of politics in this country, one that has led to bloodshed and madness everywhere else it has been tried. The American republic doesn’t exist to make dreams come true, but to prevent nightmares from becoming reality.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has called for a “national divorce,” voter suppression, and now seemingly civil war, appeals made all the more concerning by the key committee positions she holds in Congress.
In an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, the Georgia representative lamented the fact that the country was so polarized and her “way of life” was under attack from the left.
“The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war,” she said. “But it’s going that direction, and we have to do something about it.”
In the same segment, Hannity also said he couldn’t see another option aside from splitting up the country, touting supposed benefits including continued fossil fuel use, paper-only ballots, and full state control of public education.
Greene’s outrageous comments came just hours after she told Charlie Kirk that Democratic voters who move to Republican-controlled states should lose the right to vote for five years. The day before that, she tweeted that the U.S. “[needs] a national divorce.”
Her borderline seditious rhetoric is made all the more frightening by the fact that Greene sits on several powerful committees in the House of Representatives, including the Oversight and Homeland Security committees. She earned those appointments through a shrewd rebrand, during which she allied herself closely with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but her true colors seem to be coming back out. McCarthy has yet to speak publicly on Greene’s comments.
Despite her complaints about divisive “abuse” from the left, Greene has shared conspiracy theories, peddled racist and antisemitic beliefs, and helped incite the January 6 riot. And when she talks about “our way of life” being under attack, it’s a pretty safe bet she doesn’t mean a way of life that includes equal rights for all.
By most metrics, the midterm elections were good for
Democrats and for American democracy in general. With the reelection of Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Democrats will retain
control of the Senate. They can also break the 50-50 deadlock there if Senator Raphael
Warnock wins his runoff against Herschel Walker, allowing Democrats to control
committees and end the need for discharge petitions. Democrats also avoided the
traditional huge midterm losses in the House. Republicans are projected to end up with about 219 seats,
giving them a narrow three-seat advantage.
At a state level, the news was also generally good. For the
first time since 1934, the party in the White House did not lose any state
legislative chambers during the midterms. Democrats made gains in the
Minnesota, Vermont, Maryland, and Massachusetts legislatures. They also flipped
three governors’ seats and lost one (Nevada).
But all this doesn’t change the fact that the situation continues to
deteriorate, albeit at a slower pace than might otherwise be the case. Behind
Democrats outperforming incredibly low expectations by preventing a red wave,
there’s another story: Our government remains dysfunctional, the Republican Party
is putting increasingly unqualified authoritarian candidates in office, and
more states have fallen into near permanent single-party autocratic rule. We
also see that those permanent single-party GOP states intend to make cruelty
and culture war the centerpiece of their policy decisions.
However you want to spin it, losing the House is still a
loss. Whether Republicans control the House by three votes or 50, it is
effectively the end of the Biden legislative agenda. It is also effectively the
end of any hope of securing voting rights, limiting gerrymandering, or
preventing electoral shenanigans before the 2024 election. The irony is that
gerrymandering made the GOP takeover possible. While Democrats in New York acceded to rulings by the state
Supreme Court striking down gerrymandered districts favoring Democrats,
Republicans in Ohio, North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana went to the election with maps
struck down by state courts still in place.
The results of House elections will bring America’s
dysfunctional government into sharp focus over the next two years. For the GOP,
a three-seat majority is far too small to manage the fractious Freedom Caucus.
These Republican hard-liners aren’t interested in governance; they will insist
on making everything a life-or-death showdown with no room for compromise. This
includes funding the government and raising the debt ceiling. Whoever the speaker is will face
the same ugly choices that John Boehner and Paul Ryan did: Cater to the
radicals, or work with Democrats to pass needed legislation and be labeled a
Republican in Name Only. Former Republican insiders assure me that they will choose the former.
Instead of keeping the government running or servicing the
national debt, the GOP-led House will make investigations and potential
impeachment of President Biden the centerpiece of their reign.
Imagine the repetitive overkill of Benghazi with the conspiracy-laden nuttiness
of anti-vaccine diatribes against Anthony Fauci, and obsession with Hunter Biden’s laptop.
While there is some debate whether Republicans in the House
will have the stomach for impeachment hearings, it seems likely that the
Freedom Caucus will be larger, louder, and more powerful than a tiny handful of
new representatives elected from tight districts. This is another side effect
of partisan gerrymandering, which causes less than 14 percent of congressional districts to be
competitive. Hesitant Republicans will also be pushed hard by Fox News and
other conservative media outlets to go along with aggressive investigations in
order to avoid the “RINO” label and a potential primary challenge.
The quality of Republicans going to Congress isn’t improving
either. It appears Lauren Boebert is going to squeak out a win in Colorado.
Soon-to-be Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, who embraced Donald Trump when he saw
him as a ticket to power, is both openly Christian nationalist and completely unqualified. While
prominent election deniers such as Mark Finchem in Arizona and Marchant in
Nevada lost their races, on the whole they did well nationally. The Washington Postnotes that about 60 percent of
election-denying Republicans nominees on the November ballot won their races. On top of that, about 70 percent of Republicans in the
House are election deniers who will happily work to overturn the 2024 election
given the chance.
At the same time, voters in Ohio and North Carolina have decided they’ve had enough of
democracy, and put partisan supreme courts in place. These courts will allow
gerrymandered borders and voter suppression in those states to ensure that elections
there hold all the suspense and drama of finding out whether Putin’s United
Russia Party retains control of the Duma.
The consequences of this can be seen in Wisconsin, where
Republicans won control of the legislature in 2010, and promptly gerrymandered
democracy out of existence. Despite Democratic incumbent Tony Evers winning the
governor’s race in Wisconsin by 3.6 percent, voters in Wisconsin barely
prevented the GOP from having veto-proof supermajorities in the Wisconsin
House and Senate. There is no conceivable way for the people of Wisconsin to
put Democrats in charge of the legislature. As a consequence, there is no way
for them to repeal an 1849 law banning abortion, since there is no mechanism
for a statewide ballot initiative, despite strong voter support for it.
It is also highly concerning that the big winners in the
election were the red state politicians who have gerrymandered, suppressed, and
run their campaigns on culture-war issues such as abortion, race, and LGBTQ issues. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won his reelection by a wide margin, and
Florida Republicans expanded their control of both houses of the legislature
despite running on poll taxes, “don’t say gay” laws, and a promise of a near-total ban on abortion.
Likewise in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton won handily after making culture war issues like abortion,
book bans, and transgender children their top legislative, legal, and policy
issues.* There is every reason to believe that Republicans, particularly in
red to deep-red states, will take away the message that there is no penalty to
be paid for targeting vulnerable people in the name of battling “wokeness.” Nor
was there any consequence in Texas for governing poorly in the wake of a
collapsing electrical grid or the botched handing of another mass school
shooting in Uvalde.
So while Tuesday’s election result were better than expected,
the slow decline into neofascism continues, just perhaps a bit less quickly.
The House is gone, now run by ideologues uninterested in governing. Two states
voted in supreme courts for themselves that cut off the last possible escape
from single-party Christian nationalist rule. Wisconsin demonstrated the
hopelessness of recovering from autocracy, as it does every two years. And in
supposedly “moderate” red-leaning states, voters have had a chance to experience
both the incompetence and hatred of neofascism and found that they like it.
Texas has had decades of Republican rule. Its electrical
grid is falling apart, and people died en masse during a cold snap two
years ago. Nothing has been done to fix it. The attorney general is under
indictment, and no one seems to care. Police stood around for an hour during
one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, and the governor didn’t
bother with either funerals for the children or calls to do something to
prevent future mass murders. Instead of addressing real problems, the state’s
leaders focused on tax breaks for the wealthy, making guns more readily available, and calling three special sessions of the
legislature to ban mostly nonexistent transgender
student athletes
from competing in sports.
And Texans overwhelmingly rewarded them all with another four
years in power. Because the cruelty was always the point. Some election deniers
lost, and Donald Trump took a whipping, and that’s great. But
it didn’t reverse the overall democratic decline that has been happening since
the 2010 elections.
* This article originally misidentified Paxton’s office.
On Wednesday, the Republican establishment—or at least what’s left of it—finally made its move against Donald Trump. The disappointing midterm results, in which many of Trump’s handpicked candidates flopped—largely because they were 2020 election truthers running in swing states—opened opportunity up. The Murdoch empire struck hard and fast, anointing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who mimics Trump in both style and substance but is seen as being more palatable and less erratic—as the former president’s natural successor.
Trump, meanwhile, took a battering from others in the party. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” former adviser David Urban toldTheNew York Times. The anti-anti-Trump National Review has posted a series of articlescalling for an alternative and one in which it offered Republicans a stark choice: Pick Donald Trump or pick winning elections. “Almost every one of these Trump-endorsed candidates that you see in competitive states has lost,” former New Jersey governor and Trump frenemy Chris Christie said on ABC after the election. “It’s a huge loss for Trump. And, again, it shows that his political instincts are not about the party, they’re not about the country—they’re about him.” That just about summed up the conventional wisdom—at least among Trump’s opponents.
Trump, meanwhile, has spent the days after the election seething, blaming his wife and other allies for failed endorsements like Dr. Oz, who lost in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. He has also been posting about potential 2024 primary opponents, like DeSantis and Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, on his dreary platform Truth Social, where he has strained to regain his 2016 form.
But Trump has also started throwing his weight around. On Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik, an upstate New York Republican who was a moderate—at least by recent GOP standards—before remaking herself as a Trumpist to rise within the House leadership, endorsed him for president, despite the fact that he is at least five days away from announcing that he will run.
“I am proud to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2024,” Stefanik said in a statement. “It is time for Republicans to unite around the most popular Republican in America who has a proven track record of conservative governance.” J.D. Vance, an anti Trumper turned sycophant who won Ohio’s senate race on Tuesday thanks in part to Trump’s endorsement during the primary, was similarly effusive. “Every year, the media writes Donald Trump’s political obituary. And every year, we’re quickly reminded that Trump remains the most popular figure in the Republican Party,” he said. And on Friday Trump began to meddle in the Republican House leadership race, suggesting that he would only back current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker if he kissed the ring (again): Appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Trump ally Jason Miller said that McCarthy “must be much more declarative that he supports President Trump in 2024” if he wants to win.
It marked the beginning of what looks to be the GOP’s second civil war in six years.
In 2016, the Republican establishment took on Donald Trump and lost badly. That was partly because it didn’t ever really have a Trump alternative and instead hopscotched between flawed, smarmy candidates like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz. In 2022, it has seemingly learned some important lessons. For one, it has anointed a successor who is Trump-like, in many ways: DeSantis is an ardent culture warrior who first rose to prominence by opening his state up during the Covid-19 pandemic, has sparred with Disney about wokeness, and recently flew a bunch of helpless migrants to Martha’s Vineyard as part of a sociopathic, Trump-like political stunt.
The establishment has another benefit: Trump is not the candidate he was in 2016. He is increasingly myopic and erratic, even by his own standards. His political program has contracted significantly and now revolves ever more around the personage of Donald Trump, the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, and increasingly baroque loyalty tests. Trump is a diminished figure. Unlike in 2016, when he effortlessly cast aside a host of goons, he also appears to be genuinely rattled by DeSantis. He should still be considered the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, but it is, for the first time in six years, possible to imagine other scenarios. He seems beatable.
But Trump has one asset that he didn’t in 2016. Over the last six years he has built his own political establishment and situated himself as the Republican Party’s most important power broker. Stefanik’s endorsement is a case in point. Fifteen years ago, Stefanik would have made a career as a moderate Republican; in 2018, she saw the writing on the wall, and became one of Trump’s most vociferous backers. She is far from the only one.
Trump has allies in leadership positions throughout the Republican Party: from local and state level organizations to the Republican National Committee. The most important test for Trump as he has built this network is loyalty. Over the coming weeks and month, he will force his allies to bend the knee, or at least try to. He will also use them to attempt to create a firewall between himself and DeSantis, and to make him appear to be the party’s inevitable 2024 nominee. The GOP has been Trump’s party for a long time but, even after Tuesday’s defeats, he has more allies in powerful positions than ever.
If 2016 looked like one man against the remnants of a party, 2022 is far different. The older Republican establishment is working to anoint DeSantis. But it has less power than it did six years ago, when Trump easily brushed it aside. Trump is a broken, erratic figure, but he has more institutional power than ever—the question is whether he knows how to use it.
A few days before Donald Trump left the presidency, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell appeared in the Oval Office to propose a plan to keep the president in power. Lindell, who had by that time earned his way into the president’s confidence, was photographed just outside the White House, holding papers that he later presented to Trump. Those papers apparently advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act, urging “martial law if necessary.”
Lindell was only able to speak to Trump for a few minutes before he was diverted to White House lawyers—who dismissed his ideas as lunacy. But experts say the vague language of the Insurrection Act (which has not been updated since the turn of the twentieth century) makes it a potential weapon for an authoritarian president to target their domestic opponents and hold onto power.
With another Trump presidency looming as a real possibility and an anti-democracy doctrine gaining support on the intellectual right, Congress may be running out of time to fix the weaknesses in America’s republic. The Insurrection Act is one such weakness in need of repair, precisely because it accords too much democracy-breaching power to the executive branch. Despite the fact that Democrats presently occupy that branch, it may make sense for them to take the necessary steps to lessen its authority.
Toward the end of his first term, the Insurrection Act became one of Trump’s fascinations. He publicly considered invoking the law several times but never followed through—when asked what he might do if he won the election and riots broke out, Trump said, “We’ll put them down very quickly. We have the right to do that, we have the power to do that if we want. Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send in [the military], and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy.”
The former president discovered “insurrection” during the summer of 2020, when he threatened to send American troops into the streets of cities that were then crowded with protesters outraged by the murder of George Floyd. Immediately after Trump’s threats, a group of Democratic senators led by Richard Blumenthal introduced the CIVIL Act, which would have required approval from Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice to use the armed forces or a militia to put down an insurrection. The CIVIL Act also would have “terminated the [president’s] authority to use military force to suppress an insurrection after 14 days unless Congress enacts a joint resolution extending such authority.” But the bill never went anywhere.
Because of its broad language and the fact that it is “very easy” for a president to invoke it, the Insurrection Act became a favorite within Trump’s more fanatical circle of advisers—precisely the sort of loyalists he’s likely to install in positions of power if he wins the 2024 election. Even Bob Woodward broke the fourth wall to sound the alarm, writing in a recent opinion essay, “Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key Cabinet and White House posts.”
Outside the official Trump orbit, the Insurrection Act found more radical support. Oath Keepers founder and Yale Law graduate Stewart Rhodes, who has been charged with seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 insurrection, urged Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call Rhodes’s anti-government militia into action. As Oath Keepers were storming into the Capitol, others waited outside Washington D.C. with a trove of weapons. In court, Rhodes’s lawyers have argued that “when he believed that the President would issue an order invoking the Insurrection Act, [Rhodes] was prepared to follow it.”
Rhodes’s ideology relies on an extreme interpretation of the Insurrection Act, but the idea at the base of that ideology—that the executive branch has supreme power over the military—has become increasingly realistic since the September 11 attacks, after which Congress gave the executive branch blank-check authorization to use military force against foreign enemies. Both President Barack Obama and Trump cited those resolutions as justification for overseas military operations.
But concerns about the executive branch’s overabundance of power go well beyond the Insurrection Act and the military. As Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center, told The New Republic, “The executive branch has grown in scope and in power and concurrently with that, we have seen presidents make broader and broader claims to executive authority, including claims to inherent powers under the Constitution, increasingly reading this vague executive authority that the Constitution grants them to authorize all kinds of actions without congressional validation and sometimes even against the wishes of Congress.”
When President Trump failed to get funding for his border wall through Congress, he declared a national emergency, using the National Emergencies Act. In a press release accompanying that declaration, the White House noted that Trump has broad powers under the law: “The President invoked two of the more than 100 available statutory authorities available in national emergencies.” And when critics accused Trump of using the National Emergencies Act to subvert the will of Congress, then-acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told the press that the move creates “zero precedent” because “this is authority given to the president in law already.”
The Trump White House was alarmingly correct: There are incredible statutory authorities available to a president who invokes the National Emergencies Act. A president can declare an emergency to test chemical weapons on U.S. citizens without their permission. He can declare a national emergency to shut off the internet. Representative Peter DeFazio, who chairs the committee of jurisdiction for efforts to reform the National Emergencies Act, told The New Republic, “I don’t think that a lot of people have thought about how broad a national emergencies declaration could be: martial law … something related to elections—it boggles the mind to think what creative anti-democratic forces could do with the National Emergencies Act.”
At the beginning of the Biden presidency, there was some hope that the Democrats would work to reel in executive overreach, but whatever energy may have existed at one point to trim the executive branch’s sails has since dissipated. The Biden White House has shown little desire to lessen its own authority. In fact, Biden used the National Emergencies Act to fund student loan relief. Critics say that there were other ways for him to accomplish that goal; a Harvard Law study found that Biden could have directed the secretary of education to forgive student loans.
However, even with a disinterested White House, there is some optimism that the National Emergencies Act might be meaningfully reformed—while it may be a rather esoteric interest, it remains a bipartisan one. Goitien, who has testified before Congress on emergency reform, told The New Republic, “I’ve heard no one speak against reforming the National Emergencies Act. I’ve never experienced an issue that got such broad and deep bipartisan support.”
In the House, the far-right Representative Andy Biggs has introduced a bill that would terminate a national emergency “30 days after the declaration unless a joint resolution affirming such declaration is enacted into law, and for other purposes.” In the Senate, Republican Mike Lee joined Bernie Sanders to introduce a bill that would end “permanent emergencies” and “prevent the President from exploiting a crisis to increase executive authority.”
The reformation of the Insurrection Act and of the National Emergencies Act should be a priority: They are simply the best tools that an authoritarian president who wants to remain in power by corrupt means can use; the potential for mayhem and abuse is just too ripe and too readily available. Naturally, there are other gaping holes in American democracy that desperately need repair—the Electoral Count Act, the Hatch Act, and the Vacancies Act all could stand to be considerably strengthened. But with the prospect of a Republican-controlled house of Congress looming, the necessary large-scale reforms to protect America’s democracy are becoming more and more unlikely. That leaves an already overloaded lame-duck session to do the bulk of this work. But it may be the case that the best thing congressional Democrats can do with their waning power is diminish the power of the Democrat in the White House.
Given the numerous election deniers running right now—for the U.S. House and Senate, for governor and for secretary of state—the 2022 midterm elections’ consequences for the state of democracy are hard to overstate. But beyond the likes of Kari Lake or Doug Mastriano, who are garnering loads of national attention, there are hundreds of local officials whose races will shape the fate of future elections: county sheriffs. Just as a smaller-scale series of local acts of intimidation and violence led us to the violent attempt to overthrow the election on January 6, 2021, there’s a growing nationwide movement of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” who are preparing for their own slow-motion insurrection.
Adherents believe that county sheriffs are empowered to enforce the law in accordance with their personal interpretation of the Constitution, that their law enforcement authority supersedes that of states and the federal government. There is “no valid basis in the text or history of the U.S. Constitution” for this, as Georgetown University Law Center and the States United Democracy Center have outlined in depth. However, fueled by this political ideology, one rooted in white supremacism, these “constitutional sheriffs” and their supporters in far-right and paramilitary groups are gearing up for the first national election after the insurrection.
A new investigation by Jessica Pishko, published at Reveal, exposes the alliances and ties between far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers and a national network of sheriffs who have embraced election denial and have “appointed themselves election police.” Election deniers have also encouraged constitutional sheriffs to run in 2022. You can hear constitutional sheriff rhetoric in a number of incumbent candidates in states such as Washington, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. Though constitutional sheriffs’ groups had been on the wane in recent years, Pishko reports, the pandemic and the “Stop the Steal” movement has given them new life, infusing them with new members and granting them a bigger platform with anti-vaxxers and election deniers.
More than half of Arizona’s current sheriffs, according to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, “are at least partially aligned” with the constitutional sheriff movement. Some have also joined the election denial effort, such as Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, who spoke to the Yavapai County Preparedness Team in Arizona, an organization that has some association with the Oath Keepers, as it was planning surveillance of ballot drop boxes in Arizona—“Operation Drop Box.” As the head of the Preparedness Team said at its meeting ahead of the midterms, “Everybody is worried about civil war.” Richard Mack, a former board member of the Oath Keepers and founder of the influential Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, has also visited Arizona to speak to the group. Democrats are “getting away with murder,” he told a gathering of the Preparedness Team, and “all we are asking for is that every county sheriff look at what happened in his county and make sure that we don’t fall prey.”
Elsewhere in Arizona, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb is working with True the Vote, who were behind the debunked election-denying 2000 Mules film and who have collaborated with QAnon influencers. Lamb is “promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement,” as Media Matters reported. In addition to supporting “Stop the Steal” and blaming the January 6 insurrection on Hillary Clinton, among others, Lamb led a “posse” in response to Black Lives Matter protests, recruiting civilians, though his county saw no protests.
The campaign Lamb has joined, called Protect America Now, encourages sheriffs to “be ready to enforce the law and protect our constituents from any form of illegal activity,” according to documents Pishko obtained. It also offers the sheriffs “much needed grant resources to help you secure the voting procedures in your county with equipment, personnel, and increased citizen communication.” Among its recommendations are increased “patrol” at ballot drop boxes and reporting any suspicious activity to a national hotline run by True the Vote. “When other areas of government breakdown,” their letter to sheriffs says, “our local Sheriffs step in to make sure the law is enforced.”
Through such outreach, invoking election “security,” other sheriffs have enlisted in their efforts, pledging to carry out “investigations” into alleged election fraud across the United States. In Johnson County, Kansas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden failed to identify any election fraud. His investigation, TheKansas City Starreported, “hasn’t led to any charges or arrests but has helped build his profile among election deniers.” As he told supporters at an August meeting, “We’ve got to find somebody” who can say definitively that fraud is happening. At the same meeting, Hayden also told supporters, “I’m so sick and tired of hearing, ‘You’re hurting our democracy. You’re hurting our democracy.’ We don’t have a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic,” a far-right trope.
Those behind “Operation Drop Box,” the ballot box surveillance effort, stood down after they faced legal action for their desire to monitor voting locations while carrying guns. But that was just one part of the larger effort pushed by True the Vote and others, who have been coordinating to monitor ballot boxes on a much larger scale, as Pishko uncovered. As of October 27, Jen Fifield at Votebeat reported, more than 4,500 people signed up with True the Vote to monitor ballot boxes nationwide. “Their list of volunteers is growing by dozens a day,” Fifield noted, “especially since the news of voter intimidation at the sites began to spread.” That is, as the media has tracked these groups, as voters have lodged complaints, their numbers are growing.
The hard right, which GOP candidates dare not contradict, says tomorrow’s midterm elections will be rigged. This is not easy to reconcile with the strong likelihood that tomorrow’s midterm elections will go well for Republicans. The election-denying sore-loser party of 2020 is preparing to become the election-denying sore-winner party of 2022.
“Calls for actual violence after the midterms are real,” Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told Politico’s Mark Scott. “Scores” of hard-right groups around the country are alleging election fraud in advance of Election Day, Politicoreports, with followers numbering in the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands.
The conspiracists include former President Donald Trump, who recirculated last week a baseless rumor that voting machines in Wisconsin have been hacked by WiscNet, a nonprofit cooperative that provides internet access to public schools and libraries. WiscNet has previously been targeted by Republican state legislators who want to turn its state contracts over to for-profit companies. The source of the rumor, Republican state Representative Janel Brandtjen, who chairs the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee, moved in late July to decertify the 2020 election results even though the Republican-controlled state legislature had already audited them and found no evidence to justify decertification. Now she’s calling for “an immediate post-election forensic examination of these voting machines by independent, cyber experts.”
Conspiracists don’t mind predicting the midterms will be a rigged game in Georgia—some bullshit about Q.R. codes—even though Republicans control the state legislature, the governorship, and the secretary of state’s office, giving them absolute control over the election apparatus. After all, Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, famously betrayed the cause by turning a deaf ear to then-President Trump’s felonious plea that “I have to find 12,000 votes.” If challenger Stacey Abrams defeats Governor Brian Kemp, the conspiracists will have no more trouble vilifying Raffensperger than they did in 2020.
Election deniers are, as you would expect, focusing their efforts this year on battleground states. In Wisconsin, for instance, the governor’s and Senate races are judged a toss-up. The deniers may be crazy, but they aren’t stupid.
Still, this is a national movement that Trump started in 2020. The previous movement to deny Trump’s loss (which began before the 2020 election) begat this year’s movement to delegitimize the midterms. As the example of Wisconsin’s Brandtjen demonstrates, the two causes are one. So if you’re running this year on the message that the 2020 elections were rigged, aren’t you setting yourself up for cognitive dissonance on November 9? More than halfof all Republicans running for congressional and key statewide offices this year say the 2020 presidential election was stolen, according to projections by TheWashingtonPost’s Adrian Blanco and Amy Gardner. Most of these deniers are projected to win. When they do, won’t it be awkward to explain how an elections apparatus that was so thoroughly corrupt in 2020 cleaned itself up in two short years?
The cognitive dissonance should be even more acute for Republican voters. According to the Pew Research Center, as recently as October 2018, the proportion of Republican voters who expected the following month’s midterm elections to be run “very” or “somewhat” well was actually larger (87 percent) than the proportion of Democrats who thought the same (79 percent). More important, the partisan gap was only eight percentage points. A healthy 81 percent of all voters did not anticipate a corrupt election. There was a lot wrong with the country in 2018—Donald Trump was president, after all—but both parties demonstrated a roughly equal faith in the elections apparatus.
That changed dramatically in October 2020, when Biden was leading in the polls. Instead of 87 percent, now only 50 percent of Republicans expected the following month’s presidential election to be run “very” or “somewhat” well. The reason was that Trump had been telling supporters for months that mail ballots would be used to rig the election. The proportion of Democratic voters expressing faith in the election, meanwhile, dipped only slightly, from 79 percent in 2018 to 72 percent in 2020.
After Trump lost, a majority of Republicans accepted Trump’s narrative that Biden stole the election, and 61 percent continue to believe that, or at least to tell pollsters they believe it. Now, according to Pew, 44 percent of Republicans decline to agree that tomorrow’s midterm elections will be run “very” or “somewhat” well. That’s smaller than the 50 percent who declined to say so in October 2020. But the partisan gap between Republicans and Democrats on this question has widened from eight percentage points in 2018 to 22 percentage points in 2020 to a whopping 32 percentage points in 2022.
Democrats have been told for nearly two years that they’re likely to lose the House, and maybe also the Senate, yet Pew’s polls show their faith in elections has increased since 2018. Republicans have been told during the same period that they’re likely to win back the House, and maybe the Senate, yet the Pew polls show their faith in elections has declined since 2018.*
The reason is that over the past two years Republicans, at Trump’s instruction, have surrendered to an increasingly nihilistic and repellant worldview, one that justifies the violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection and finds humor in the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband. It’s getting harder and harder to resist comparisons between the GOP’s MAGA base and the Camicie Nere,the Blackshirts organized by Benito Mussolini to attack political enemies, later emulated by Adolf Hitler’sBraunhemden, or Brownshirts. Republican voters may not admire their MAGA Blackshirts, but they tolerate them and make light of their methods.
One of those methods is to discredit elections, no matter who’s expected to win. As your faith diminishes in democratic processes, it becomes less necessary to defend victory on democratic grounds. The point is no longer to win elections. The point is to hold power. If a corrupt system delivers that power, well, at least it was our side that won.
Democrats, by contrast, since 2018 have grown more confident in electoral processes, with 88 percent of them now anticipating well-run elections. As Republicans have grown more contemptuous of democratic institutions, Democrats have lent them more conspicuous support. Maybe it’s just a partisan oppositional reflex. But I’m more inclined to think Democrats have become more respectful of ordinary democratic processes out of worry that if they don’t lend them their support, no one else will.
* This article originally misstated the date range of the Pew surveys.
American billionaires have spent a record $881 million on the crucial 2022 midterms, a new report found, with most of that money going to Republican candidates and causes.
The mindboggling amount is 44 percent higher than billionaires’ total spending during the 2018 midterm cycle and could easily reach $1 billion by next week, according to a report published Thursday by the group Americans for Tax Fairness.
The influx of cash from billionaires has made this the most expensive midterms ever.
A separate report from Open Secrets found that midterm spending at both the state and federal levels is expected to exceed $16.7 billion this year.
That is the most that has ever been spent on midterm elections at both levels, the group’s director Sheila Krumholz said.
The biggest individual billionaire donor this election was George Soros, who gave $128 million to the liberal super PAC Democracy II. But his total contribution was edged out by the combined total of donations from the second- and third-place donors, Richard Uihlein and Ken Griffin, who gave $67.3 million and $66.1 million respectively to several Republican super PACs and candidates.
Overall, Republicans received 59 percent of the donations, while Democrats received only 39 percent. Considering billionaires make up a tiny fraction of the U.S. population, their contributions risk “distorting our democracy by drowning out the voices of regular Americans,” Americans for Tax Fairness warned.
The 2022 midterms haven’t even happened yet, but they’re already proving to be some of the most contentious and crucial elections in recent history. Democrats are struggling to maintain their razor-thin hold on Congress, while Republicans have promised a raft of petty repercussions should they take control, such as impeaching President Joe Biden.
Many GOP members are already sowing disinformation about the elections online and are priming voters to reject tight Democratic victories.
So it’s no surprise that people in general, especially billionaires, are pouring money into the elections to try and influence the outcome in their favor.
In the end, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won his runoff against
Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency of Brazil, becoming the first Brazilian
politician to be democratically elected president three times, whilst
condemning Bolsonaro to become the first sitting Brazilian president to be
denied a second term (Brazil’s longest serving head of state, Getúlio Vargas,
was only elected twice, though he also ruled Brazil as a dictator between 1930
and 1934, and between 1937 and 1945). It was, to be sure, a near-run thing. For after defying pollsters’ predictions and the expectations of many both in Brazil and
internationally that Lula would get the 51 percent of the vote needed to be
elected in the first round, Bolsonaro then gained ground in the last week
before the runoff, holding Lula to 48.2 percent of the vote while rebounding
to secure 43.2 percent for himself, a gap of about 6.1 million votes.
Bolsonaro’s surprisingly strong showing was chastening, not to
say terrifying—not just to the left both in Brazil and abroad, but also to the
Brazilian center and center right that had come to oppose Bolsonaro and dread
what he might do were he to win a second term, so much so that the former
four-time governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin of the center-right Social
Democracy Party, who had been defeated by Lula in the 2006 election,
was willing to sign on this time as Lula’s vice presidential running mate.
Nevertheless, it was widely assumed that Lula would gain votes
in the second round thanks to the support that he received almost
immediately after the first round from two longtime rivals: the third-place
finisher, Simone Tebet of the centrist Democratic Movement Party, the MDB, who
had gotten 4.16 percent of the vote, and the fourth-place finisher, Ciro Gomes
of the center-left Democratic Labor Party, the PDT, a onetime minister in
Lula’s government, who had received 3 percent. Their backing, observers
believed, would lead many of the 8.1 million Brazilians who had voted
for them to support Lula the second time around. It was also assumed that of
the 38 million voters who had abstained or spoiled their ballots in the first
round, more who participated in round two would
vote for Lula than for Bolsonaro.
Instead, it was Bolsonaro who grew stronger, and Lula won 50.9
percent to 49.1 percent, and by only two million votes—that is to say, with
less than half the number that had separated him from Bolsonaro in the first
round. This is not to downplay Lula’s personal victory, for his truly phoenix-like return from what seemed like political death and personal
disgrace. Having been president between 2003 and 2010, and then having remained
the dominant figure in his Workers’ Party, the PT, during the presidency of his
chosen successor and former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, before her
constitutionally highly dubious impeachment and removal from office by the
Brazilian Congress in 2017, Lula was himself given a nine-and-a-half-year
prison sentence for corruption. He served almost two years before being freed
provisionally by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2019, and his conviction was
nullified in 2021.
On the Brazilian left, what happened to Dilma is all but
universally viewed as a slow motion right-wing coup. This may be overstating
things in the sense that one can also view Dilma’s ouster as a power play pure
and simple by her vice president, Michel Temer, to take her
place, as he indeed did. Nevertheless, the destitution of Dilma and the jailing
of Lula, who had planned to run for the presidency in 2018 but was barred from
doing so, opened the way for Bolsonaro’s victory in the presidential elections
that year. But today, it is Lula who has vanquished his enemies. The sole
bitter note is that Sergio Moro, Bolsonaro’s former minister of justice and the man
who, as a prosecutor, secured Lula’s conviction and was, in a sense, his Jean
Valjean, just won election to the Brazilian Senate.
Unsurprisingly, the Latin American left is
ecstatic. Argentina’s Alberto Fernández wrote on his Twitter feed: “Congratulations Lula!
Your victory opens up a new era in the history of Latin America … a time of
hope that starts right now.” Even before Lula had been declared the
winner, Gustavo Petro, the former guerrilla and a committed leftist who won the
presidency of Colombia last June, was
tweeting “Viva Lula,” while his vice president, Francia Márquez, tweeted that Colombia and
Brazil under Lula’s leadership would combine to “restore peace dignity and
peace to Our America [a catchphrase of the contemporary Latin American left].”
For his part, Cuba’s dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote, “Cuba congratulates you,
dear comrade … Lula returns, the Labor Party of Brazil returns, social justice will
return.” He promised Lula that his
government could “always count on Cuba.” And not to be outdone, the president
of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declared that with the return of Lula
to office, there would be “equality and humanism” in Brazil.
They are entitled to their moment of relieved excitement. But
the idea that Lula’s victory is ideologically akin to that of Petro’s or that,
as Ricardo Monreal, the majority leader of the Mexican Senate, put it excitedly in a tweet,
Lula will “direct his country [back] towards the left,” is entirely
far-fetched. For in reality, there are very few signs that we will see a return
of leftist dominance to Brazilian politics. During the campaign, Lula
emphasized over and over again that his government would not just be a
government of the PT.
And for him to succeed, Lula will have to make sure this really
will be the case. Lula’s own popularity—that is, the establishment,
coalition-building Lula of today, not the left-wing firebrand he once was and
the Latin American left hopes he still is—is quite high across a wide swathe of
Brazilian opinion. But outside of its strongholds in the states of the poor
northeast of Brazil, the PT is extremely unpopular, even among many who voted
for Lula. They may view his prosecution by Sergio Moro as persecution and his
imprisonment as a rank injustice purely motivated by the Bolsonarist right’s
desire to extinguish his political career, but they also firmly believe that
the PT itself was extremely corrupt under Lula and Dilma and remains so today.
However important his victory is, Lula is scarcely coming into
office with a resounding mandate from the Brazilian people, nor can one
legitimately speak of Bolsonarism being defeated even if Bolsonaro himself
lost. The right scored massive gains in the ideologically
fragmented Brazilian Congress, with Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party now the largest bloc
with 99 seats. Lula will simply not be able to get legislation passed without
the support of at least a part of the Brazilian right. In the Senate, where a
third of the seats were in play, Bolsonaro’s bloc is also the largest party.
And in the gubernatorial races, Bolsonaro-supported candidates won in 14 of
Brazil’s 27 states, while center-right (but not necessarily Bolsonarist)
candidates won in four others, including in Lula’s home state of Pernambuco,
leaving the center and center left with only nine governorships.
A Bolsonaro supporter even won the governor’s race in the
critical swing state of Minas Gerais, even though it voted for Lula for
president. In short, the right won the Congress and the governorships, while
Lula, not the left, won the presidency. In
the words of Benjamin Fogel, a brilliant analyst of Brazilian politics whose bona fides are
unimpeachable both as a fierce opponent of Bolsonaro and as a supporter of Lula
(they are not the same thing by any means), “Nobody else but [Lula], the
greatest Brazilian political mind of all time could have beaten Bolsonaro in
this election, and even then, it is too close for comfort.” And, he added,
“That’s truly terrifying.”
Lula’s challenges in office will be daunting. He
will be hemmed
in on all sides: a business establishment that will demand balanced budgets while
the popular movements of the left and the unions that are his base (gig economy
workers in Brazil tend toward Bolsonaro) will expect enormous increases in
social spending. And while there is a good deal a Brazilian president can do
unilaterally, and Lula can certainly reverse Bolsonaro’s determination to
shrink the role of the state, budgets must be passed by Congress. The one piece
of really good news, not just for Brazil but for the planet, is that restoring
protections to the Amazon is something that can largely be done by decree, and
these are moves Lula will unquestionably make.
And the conditions in Brazil Lula will preside over are very
different from those that obtained when he left office in 2010. For one thing,
the commodity boom that allowed him to pay for massive increases in social
spending may not be over, but it has very different characteristics in an era
of high inflation, low growth, and of course all the knock-on
effects of the war in Ukraine. And Brazil has been changed forever by the rise of the
evangelicals who are Bolsonaro’s and Bolsonarism’s most ardent and loyal
supporters. There were approximately 20 million evangelicals when Lula first
took office in 2003. By the time Dilma was impeached, they were said to number
about 60 million. Today, only five years later, there are between
65 and 70 million evangelicals in Brazil, a little under a third of its total population.
To say they will be restive under Lula’s government would be to
wildly understate the case. It is also worth noting that while recent elections
in Latin America indeed have brought the left to power in the continent’s five
most important economies (though to claim that Boric in Chile and Petro in
Colombia, let alone Maduro in Venezuela, belong to the same political family would
be absurd), this has not only been the result of an ideological shift. As the
Brazilian political scientist Oliver Stuenkel has pointed out, “Brazil’s
presidential elections mark the 15th straight opposition
victory in Latin America. Over the past [few] years, not a single democratic
leader has managed to get reelected or pick his or her successor.” And, he notes, “Brazil is angrier, more
divided, and the geopolitical context far worse” than it was the last time Lula
held office.
Brazilians celebrating Lula’s election in the streets of
São Paulo can hardly be blamed for doing so. A second Bolsonaro term really did
pose a threat to Brazilian democracy, which was why many on the center right
supported Lula. But once the euphoria is passed, one fears they will find that
in the coming years in Brazil, there will not be very much cause for
celebration.
