The Republicans Want a Right-Wing Dictatorship

American democracy is tottering. It’s not clear Americans care.

Indeed, it took six days for anyone to think this topic was worthy of discussion.

From the linked article:

There is no doubt that democracy in the United States is at serious risk. The year began with an attack on the Capitol designed to thwart the transition of power; instead of repudiating this violence, Republicans doubled down on the lie that Trump won the election and are working, right now, to rig the system in their favor. Neither Democrats nor the general public are doing much of anything to stop them.

Several pieces of legislation on voting rights have been stopped cold by the filibuster, as neither Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) nor Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) seems willing to make an exception to the archaic Senate rule in order to protect democracy. Meanwhile, the voters who care are mostly Republican partisans, believers in Trump’s lies about 2020. An October poll found that 71 percent of Republicans believe democracy is facing a “major threat,” as compared to just 35 percent of Democrats.

Experts on democracy warn that America is sleepwalking toward a disaster, a situation where the electoral playing field is so tilted in the GOP’s favor that America’s people no longer have a meaningful voice in who rules them. “We’ll wake up one day, and it’ll become clear that Democrats can’t win,” says Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell University.

THE GOP IS BUSY SETTING UP AN IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY

For the better part of four years we saw Donald Trump and Friends do their best to diminish the power of Congress and to a lesser extent the courts.

Our tricameral system functions properly when the three branches respect each other and cede to the other branches the powers the Founders wanted invested in them.

However, Trump defamed and defied Congress at almost every turn and criticized the Federal courts whenever rulings (as they often did) didn’t go his way. He even went so far as to criticize a judge based on essentially his race. Remember his “I’m building a wall” comment when a case was pending in front of a judge with a Hispanic last name from a family with a Mexican heritage?

He very nearly pulled off a coup on January 6. Just imagine where we’d be today had Mike Pence not certified Biden’s election. We now know that there was a step-by-step playbook that would have been followed to wrest the election out of the hands of the electorate and use highly-politicized state legislatures to offer up “alternative” Electoral College electors who had not been elected by the public.

Now, I think it would have ended up in the Supreme Court and that it’s quite likely that even a conservative Supreme Court would have wanted to put the kabosh on such a tactic.

HOWEVER, just ask yourself this: Would a Trump who showed so little regard for the powers of Congress have bowed to the power of the Court?

BEAR IN MIND that under our Constitution, ALL enforcement power, effectively, is in the executive branch which controls not just the FBI and the intelligence services but the military as well, so a President who places little value on what the other branches do or think, could simply ignore the Court.

The Founders expected the branches to defer to each other and respect certain boundaries. But do you have any doubt whatsoever that President Trump would have let the Supreme Court stand in his way?

Trump and his friends took note of what didn’t work for them last time, of who was uncooperative, and of what obstacles thwarted their coup.

Next time, they will be better prepared.

And mark my words: There WILL be a next time.

_Robert_ wrote:

It is probably a death throes reaction of white christians becoming the minority. The young are becoming more left leaning, secular and less white every year. They wanna look forward, to fix the climate and the rigged financial systems. tRumpists can feel it in their bones. It’s “do-or-die” for them and if they miscalculate, they will regret causing an anti-fascist “wake up call” like never seen before in the US. These idiots are doing a pretty good job of killing themselves off right now.

I don’t know if you missed my point or what. They are setting up a system where the disgruntledness and disgust of the majority won’t matter and will be manageable, because the minority will be in control of the military and the media and the elections.

This system works: see China and to a lesser extent Russia, both regimes Trump admires. And if the government makes the masses generally happy and complacent, as in China, it may be able to hang on as long as China, and I’m not seeing China failing anytime soon, are you?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Unseen.