We live in a democracy in which the majority does not rule. Ours is a government of minority rule. Polarized minorities rule here.
According to Gallup, eight in ten Americans believe abortion should be legal to some degree. Sixty-five percent don’t want Roe v. Wade overturned. Only 20 percent say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. But the Supreme Court is about to gut Roe, and let state legislatures decide whether abortion should be legal in their state. As a result, abortion will be outlawed in all circumstances in half the states — those with Republican-controlled legislatures. What for the last fifty years has been a constitutionally-protected right, will, in much of the country, become illegal.
Why have the abortion-rights movement and its allies in the Democratic Party allowed this to happen?
Like its partners in the abortion-rights movement, such as Planned Parenthood, the Democratic Party reacts to crises rather than preventing them. They don’t think long term and they’re not proactive. They’re always on the defensive, never the offensive. When the Roe decision handed anti-abortion groups a loss in federal court, Republicans set out to restrict abortions in cities and states. Democrats and national abortion-rights groups didn’t respond. They should have focused on winning state elections and passing proactive abortion-rights legislation at the state level. They mistakenly believed they had in Roe the protection of a federal firewall and neglected grass-roots groups in states where the battle for abortion access has been fought for the last fifty years. First the Hyde Amendment, then the Casey case, and then the 2013 Texas anti-abortion law. All three were clear warning signs. Each should have prompted the Democrats to funnel attention and resources to local- and state-level abortion-rights organizations. National groups should have been changing the culture, building clinics, increasing abortion access, getting abortion-rights judges on courts, building electoral power, winning state elections, and passing proactive abortion-rights legislation. But the Democrats didn’t do any of these things.
In spite of the fact that the Democrats hold the majority view on abortion rights in this country, they’ve lost. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican majority that next June will overturn Roe. Republicans control more than half of state legislatures – and have used voter suppression and gerrymandering to lock in that control for the next decade and beyond. Republican state legislatures will outlaw abortion in those states – with no exceptions.
(What went on in the states during the eight years of the Obama administration tells the story: During those eight years, 13 governorships flipped from Democratic to Republican, and 29 state legislatures flipped as well. Republicans gained seats in 83 of the 99 state legislative houses. And 948 state legislative seats switched from Democratic to Republican. That was the largest loss of Democratic legislative seats since 1921 — and an egregious case of political malpractice on the part of the Democratic Party under the “leadership” of Barack Obama.)
As with abortion, so with democracy. We’re watching the same scenario unfold with our democracy. Republicans – working mostly at the state level – are taking steps to end democracy in this country, and Democrats are allowing it to happen.
Republicans with the motive to bring about democratic collapse are manufacturing the means to make it happen. Democrats are doing nothing to safeguard our constitutional order. They’re acting like they’re not even going to try. They’re not taking a single proactive step to preserve our system.
For more than a year, Republican state politicians and operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Republicans have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. Some have written statutes to take partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump loyalists are running for state and local election oversight offices, and the Democrats are not running any opposition candidates. Republicans are fine tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislatures to override the choice of the voters. And in sixteen states, Republicans have advanced laws to shift authority over elections from career officials to the state legislatures.
Trump and his Republican allies weren’t sure what to do after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. They were hesitant to act to overturn that election. They won’t be hesitant in 2024. By 2024, the Republican Party will control state electoral functions, state legislatures, both houses of congress, and the Supreme Court. They will be firmly in charge of running the election, suppressing Democratic votes, counting the ballots, and determining which electors to send to the electoral college.
In the face of all this, the Democrats are again doing nothing. They are taking no proactive steps to preserve our constitutional system. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party should be devoting his presidency to meeting this threat to our democracy. They’re not doing it. They’d rather preserve the undemocratic filibuster than preserve our democracy.
(You can see this Democratic Party failure again and again in the Biden administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The administration is never forward looking, never proactive, never taking steps to prevent the next variant, prevent the next wave, prevent the next crisis. All it ever does is react (too late) to the next variant, the next wave of hospitalizations and deaths.)
The Democrats are the majority in this country. They have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections – something neither party has ever done before. And they have won the popular vote in every six-year senate cycle for the last 20 years. But we’re no longer a country of majority rule. The partisan minority is set to cement its hold on this country forever.
