What they can get away with by @BloggersRUs

What they can get away with

by Tom Sullivan

Key features of creeping whatever-ism are the creeps and the creeping.

While all eyes are focused on the sitting president's authoritarian purge in Washington, D.C. and on his creepy, "vampiric," shadow chief of staff, Stephen Miller, there is more creeping going on just out of the spotlight in Real America™.

“Frankly, this is the kind of proposal one would expect to surface in a banana republic, not the Peach State,” said Richard Griffiths, president of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation. A legislative proposal filed April 2 seeks to establish a Journalism Ethics Board in Georgia. Griffiths first thought it was an April Fools' joke.

House Bill 734, a contrivance of Rep. Andy Welch, R-McDonough, would create an “independent” board appointed by the chancellor of the University of Georgia. It would mandate that reporters make copies of their notes, recordings, and photographs from interviews available free of charge upon request of interviewees. Violators would face fines and possible lawsuits. The board might also "investigate and sanction accredited journalists or news organizations" it felt behaved badly.

James Salzer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes that Welch "expressed frustration with what he saw as bias from a TV reporter who asked him questions about legislation recently." Just the sort of frustration one might hear in red-hatted political rallies creeping across American TV screens.

Salzer adds:

In calling for subjects of interviews to get access to photographs, audio and video recordings, Welch is setting a higher standard than he and other members of the General Assembly are under. The General Assembly long ago exempted itself from the Georgia Open Records Act, which applies to all other governmental entities in the state.

Not to be out-authoritarianed, Florida's state legislature moved to prevent citizens from amending the state constitution via citizen initiative when lawmakers refuse to address public concerns.

The Orlando Sun-Sentinal's Editorial Board explains how lawmakers plan to protect the power they habitually abuse:

Smaller class sizes, medical marijuana and dedicated funding for environmental lands are some of the changes citizen initiatives have made happen. Underway are petition drives to create a $15 minimum wage, allow recreational marijuana, open the energy market to competition, ban assault-style weapons and open primary elections in a way that would send the top two candidates regardless of party to the general election ballot.

Florida's legislative body feels violated when citizen initiatives result in lawmaking, and lawmakers have ways to try to shut the whole thing down. Anti-initiative bills backed by Republicans and business lobbies would eliminate the Constitution Revision Commission, the Board writes, thus making the Legislature "the only avenue to reform state government, which means there wouldn’t be any."

If it is not abundantly clear by now, the political divide in this country is not simply "between Democrats and Republicans, or Conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms." Nor even between jittery white nationalists threatened by growing diversity and those who embrace it. It is between those committed to representative democracy and those, both patrician and peasant, whose fundamental impulses are for rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry, updated somewhat for the digital age.

They exploit a system of government in which they do not believe and, while pledging fealty to it, only tolerate it so long as it maintains their power with a minimum of social and especially economic disruption. Their governing philosophy, as is the sitting president's, is what they can get away with. Find the line. Step over it, and dare anyone to push them back. If the pushback never comes or if it fails, they've established a more authoritarian new normal.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thus creeps creeping authoritarianism. In Georgia, where voting rights are under attack. In Florida, where the GOP slow-walks implementation of an amendment reinstating voting rights for convicted felons. And in Washington, D.C., where the rule of law itself is under attack.

Commenting on Donald Trump's (and white-nationalist Miller's) purge of Kirstjen Nielsen, Greg Sargent writes that one of the "indelible moral stains" Nielsen will carry into private life (in think tanks and green rooms, no doubt) is her implementation of Donald Trump's repugnant family separations policy. She will argue in her defense she remained in his employ to prevent worse.

"But one thing we can be reasonably certain of," Sargent writes, "is that if Trump could get away with it, he’d do far worse things." Stay tuned.