Republican 'democracy' means handcuff successors and deny people what they voted for

This is the month the Republican Party all but gave up on democracy.

Not one prominent congressional Republican has stood up and objected to the GOP-engineered legislative coups unfolding in Wisconsin and Michigan.

If you’re waiting for Republicans to show any shame, you must have placed yourself in a time capsule before the 2016 GOP convention. But this abdication of any pretense of a belief in elections makes perfect sense in a party that has long favored shrinking the electorate over enhancing its own appeal, even before Donald Trump made this strategy as obvious as his lies.

What’s also clear is that the fate of America now depends on whether Democrats can expand voting rights faster than Republicans can restrict them.

The GOP’s smash-and-grab “lame duck” agenda in the Badger and Wolverine states has unfolded rapidly and is blatantly aimed at keeping the right’s rejected policies in place long after Democrats are sworn in. This sort of disdain for the will of voters is possible in large part due the scourge of partisan gerrymandering that's likely illegal.

These unfair electoral maps gave the GOP huge majorities in the Wisconsin and Michigan legislatures when the party barely carried the states in 2016. Last month those maps helped them keep control of both state legislatures, even as Democrats won statewide offices from governor on down.

Handcuffing successors, punishing workers

Wisconsin’s Republicans are just waiting for Gov. Scott Walker to sign a flurry of bills that will rip away the ability of the next governor and attorney general to conduct basic state business without the approval of the legislature. These bills will, for instance, keep Gov.-elect Tony Evers and Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul, both Democrats, from keeping campaign promises to withdraw the state from a lawsuit designed to blow up the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Handcuffing your successors is bad, but what’s happening just across Lake Michigan is possibly more revealing — and even more harmful to the state’s poorest residents.

Republicans in Michigan, where I live, are also trying to deny Democrats elected to statewide constitutional offices the powers that their GOP predecessors took for granted. For instance, they’re trying to take away the secretary of state’s ability to enforce campaign finance laws after Jocelyn Benson was elected secretary of state on a platform of — you guessed it! — better oversight of campaign finance.

But that’s not nearly the most rotten thing going on in Michigan.

Faced with ballot initiatives that would have raised the minimum wage and established earned sick leave for all the state’s workers, Republicans instead passed both proposals last summer as a way to keep them off the ballot and make them easier to change. Now, surprise, they have amended those laws to deny the sick leave to 1 million workers, and slow the rise of the lowest acceptable wage to $12 by 2030 instead of 2022 and, for tipped workers, to $4.58 by 2030 instead of $12 by 2024.

This process is clearly against the intent of Michigan's Constitution, and if these amendments survive a court challenge, it will be because conservatives on the state Supreme Court reject the framers’ wishes. Meanwhile, taxpayers absorb the legal bills and the state’s lowest paid workers have to keep wiping footprints off their foreheads.

These attacks on workers make the veneer of this whole charade translucent.

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Republicans would love for me to point out that both sides take advantage of lame-duck sessions to enact preferred policies. But what’s going on here is not just the punishing of partisan opponents. Republicans are going directly after the ability of citizens, primarily citizens in urban areas where voters tend to be less white and far less conservative, to participate in their own governance.

Shameless attacks on voting are the thread running through these lame-duck sessions. In Ohio, where voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment to limit gerrymandering in May, Republicans are working to make it harder to pass ... constitutional amendments.

In North Carolina, which pioneered this type of power grab in 2016, the GOP House and Senate just passed a voter ID law that would have prevented one fraudulent vote of 4.8 million cast in the last presidential election while disenfranchising many more than that. And they’re pursuing this despite a case of what appears to be actual election fraud that would not have been hindered in any way by making voters show identification.

Likewise, the Wisconsin GOP is trying to keep Democrats from altering a voter ID law that likely helped Trump barely win the state in 2016, while eliminating the early voting that could have helped Evers prevail over Walker in 2018. And though 65 percent of Floridians voted on Nov. 6 to enfranchise 1.4 million voters with felony records, state Republicans seem to be eager to spoil or at least slow that effort to a crawl.

Again, none of this is surprising or new. America has no history of significant voter fraud, but we have a 200-plus year tradition of voter suppression.

After red states enacted an avalanche of voting restrictions in response to the massive multicultural wave that elected Barack Obama and huge Democratic congressional majorities in 2008, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

Americans who believe in democracy woke up to the GOP’s hardball and began passing bills and citizen-backed initiatives that include automatic voter registration, mail-in ballots and independent redistricting commissions — the sort of reforms Greg Sargent recommends to counter the right’s “constitutional hardball” in his new book, "An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics."

Republicans are terrified of voters

Those reforms are now law in Michigan, thanks to voters. However, Republicans hope to eliminate same-day registration from a package of ballot reforms voters passed by 67 percent to 33 percent. Why? "Election Day registration does more than anything else to increase voter turnout," Ari Berman, author of "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," told me.

Conservatives have become increasingly ruthless in their efforts to limit ballot access and cast any election they lose as illegitimate. Trump even suggested his own election was rigged because he didn’t win the popular vote.

All of this reveals a party that’s terrified of voters. And it should be.

The last time a Republican won over 50 percent in a national election was 2004, in the midst of a ginned-up war and terror alerts of various colors. While experts debate whether a 40-seat Democratic gain in the House is actually a wave, Republicans know that voters turned out in 2018 in percentages not seen in a midterm since before women gained the right to vote.

Looking ahead to what will likely be record turnout in a presidential election in 2020, knowing that the economy probably won’t be any better than it is now and neither will Trump’s tweets, Republicans have already given up on the idea that they will ever win over most voters. But they are reminding us now that they’re not going to let a little democracy get in the way of imposing their agenda on voters who rejected it.

Jason Sattler, a writer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and host of "The GOTMFV Show" podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @LOLGOP.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Republican 'democracy' means handcuff successors and deny people what they voted for