The Day That Democracy Died

When you get old and your grandchildren ask you when it was, exactly, when democracy came to an end in the United States, you can answer,today, June 27, 2019.

Today is the day that five Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices ruled that the Federal Government has no right to protect itself from partisan rigging of elections for its own officials:

"The Supreme Court’s conservatives decided Thursday that federal courts do not have a role to play in deciding whether partisan gerrymandering goes too far, giving a dominant political party in a state leeway to draw electoral maps that preserve or even expand its power.

“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

The action puts a stop to recent decisions by federal courts across the country that have found extreme partisan gerrymandering went so far as to violate the constitutional rights of voters."

Partisan gerrymandering, of course, conducted entirely by the Republican party.  So the Republican legislatures that rigged their States' elections to ensure that, once a State goes Republican, it never changes, are now free to see to it that it is essentially impossible for Democrats to compete fairly.

This is the fruit of the decades-long campaign, going back to Nixon at least, to pack the court with corrupt Republican Justices.  This is a decision that is far worse than Bush v. Gore or Citizens United, because it legitimizes the open Republican theft of elections all over this country.  And if nobody else will say this, at least I will, however futile it is:  This is not a conservative decision; it is a corrupt decision.  No honest Justice, liberal or conservative, could be for this open perversion of the electoral process.  This is an act of pure corruption, not of political ideology; and it is today that the decades-long effort by Republicans to pack the Supreme Court with criminals finally paid off.  Now it will be left to the very Republicans that stole the elections in State after State to do whatever they want to see to it that they can destroy the national Democratic Party, and with it any remaining semblance of democracy in the United States.

For decades, Republicans have faced the inevitable prospect that their voting base of angry, hate filled, ignorant rural white voters will soon be a minority in this country.  So their answer is not to expand their appeal so that they represent the majority, but to destroy democracy itself, rather than lose power. And today is the day they succeeded.  Congratulations, white patriots, your golden age has arrived.  You'd better pray that it works out better for you than it did for Germany in the 1930's.