For the second day in a row, Republican extremists have picked the wrong fight – and they’re going to lose
On Wednesday, the Tennessee Republican state legislature wrongly expelled two Black Democrats, simply to see if they could get away with it. On Thursday, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas outlawed the abortion pill nationwide. Both these moves are already under heavy legal dispute. Regardless of how either of these situations shakes out, these Republican extremists have picked the wrong fight.
One of the key tenets of fascist oppression is for the majority to strip the rights of the minority. Why let things be equal, or anything close to it, when the majority can abuse its position to carve out special rights for itself? It’s wrong and evil no matter how you look at it. But what these Republicans are doing is wrong, evil, and stupid.
It would be difficult for Republicans to come out on top of one of these battles. But they’re forcing both these battles to happen, simultaneously. They’re declaring war on two demographics at the same time. There’s an old adage about not fighting a war on two fronts for a reason. About 70% of Americans are women, racial minorities, or both. In a majority rule democracy, that’s the fight they want? So be it.
Republicans are also doing everything they can to try to make it harder for the groups they’re oppressing to vote. But at some point the sheer number of outraged voters overcomes any attempts at suppressing that vote. We saw it when we defeated Trump in 2020. We saw it when we put the expected “red wave” out of its misery in 2022. We saw it last week when we won the Wisconsin Supreme Court race by double digits. Republicans can play all the games they like, but we just keep beating them.
Yesterday I wrote that because the Republican Party has become so extremist that it’s essentially lost its status as a national party and is now relegated to regional status, it has even less reason to hold back in the shrinking number of areas in which it does still have control. Now we’re seeing even more evidence of that. The Republicans have lost the White House, they’ve lost the Senate, and after next year they’ll have lost their opportunity to ever control the House again. All they have left is judicial terrorism and state legislature terrorism, so they’re using it accordingly.
Of course this will only serve to motivate even more Americans to go out and make sure the Republicans lose even more of their power. Until a few years ago, most people who are inclined to vote Democrat didn’t bother to vote in things like state legislature races or state Supreme Court races. Now the Democrats are winning those kinds of elections regularly. The state legislature majorities in Michigan and Pennsylvania both shifted from Republican to Democrat last November for a reason.
Yet instead of the Republican Party figuring out that it needs to start shifting back toward the middle and regain its viability with the American mainstream, it’s making a bee line for the extremist far reaches of total lunacy. Start expelling Black legislators for being Black? Check. Start stripping women of their most basic personal rights? Check.
But good luck to these Republicans in the next election. On Wednesday, Tennessee Republicans likely ensured that they’ll lose their supermajority status in the state legislature next year, because even in a red state there will be enough pushback from the left and the center to start moving the needle.
And if the Supreme Court ends up siding with the lower court ruling banning the abortion pill nationwide, it’ll create the kind of widespread public demand that’ll finally allow the Supreme Court to be expanded. At no point in the past two years have the Democrats had the votes to make that happen. But if they take back the House next year, and keep 51 Senate seats while replacing Sinema with Gallego, there will be enough votes to add as many Supreme Court Justices as the public wants.
So if extremist Republicans and their extremist judges really want to keep digging themselves a deeper hole like this, that’s their call. All it’ll do is keep motivating a larger and larger majority of Americans to make it their life’s mission to vote these thugs out of power. These Republicans keep wanting to see what they can get away with. They’re about to find out that answer the hard way.
