The power to grab some turtle soup

When I attended a public high school, I was indoctrinated in the civil religion of representative democracy.

Under this ideology, voting is seen as a non-partisan good, the very basis of the legitimacy of our government. No matter how much we might disagree on matters of policy or who should be in charge, we all agree that the path to victory is to appeal to the voters. The government is the will of the people, so the people must be allowed to speak.

It turns out that Mitch McConnell, like the rest of the Republican leaders, is a disbeliever in this civil religion; a voting rights atheist. He’s not merely against the Democratic party, but against democracy itself. We know this because he said so, in pretty much those words.

In response to HR 1, the anti-corruption bill that the Democrats are symbolically proposing, McConnell has not only dismissed it as “not going to go anywhere”, he has tipped his hand about how he really sees voting. You see, this bill includes making election day a federal holiday, thus ensuring that citizens will be able to vote without interference from their jobs or the need to take their kids to school. This can be expected to increase participation rates, especially among those who don’t own cars and have little flexibility in their hours; the urban poor who lean Democratic.

McConnell gives up the game when he insists that helping people vote is a Democratic “power grab“. He’s admitting that his party is not the one that the people would choose if they were allowed to choose. Worse, he doesn’t want them to be allowed to choose, because he puts his party’s success above democracy itself. He doesn’t want the legitimate winner to be in charge, he wants his own party to be in charge no matter what the voters want.

This is consistent with decades of Republican-led voter suppression, which includes gerrymandering, felony disenfranchisement, closing polling sites, limiting polling hours, blocking early and mail-in voting, purging the rolls, and outright fraud. And then there’s their quid-pro-quo agreement with hostile foreign powers to use hacking and social media to sway the vote.

The Republicans are not the patriots, they are traitors. They are not the loyal opposition, they are a criminal coup. We should not treat them as anything better than what they are. We should not meet them in the middle, or assume the best. They are scum.