President soulmate
by Tom Sullivan
"Election integrity" is the euphemism the G.O.P. trots out when launching newer, more diabolical efforts to subvert democracy in these disunited states. Erecting barriers to disfavored Americas voting under the guise of "integrity" has been a popular Republican pastime for decades. But it took the rise of conservative talk radio, Fox News, and social media to give "voter fraud" legs. Like so many conservative enthusiasms before it — conservative Democrats once supervised Jim Crow — public professions of faith in the American system are just so much Elmer Gantry cow chips cheerfully flung while humming Lee Greenwood.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes the case once again. When the "Grim Reaper" is not killing bills passed in the Democrat led House, the
"gravedigger of American democracy" is rubber-stamping uber-conservative Federalist Society judges and #MoscowMitch is abetting Russian efforts to hack the next election:
The phrase “Mitch McConnell is a Russian” trended on Twitter early Saturday after the Senate majority leader repeatedly blocked election security legislation in recent days.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked two attempts to pass election bills this week shortly after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before lawmakers on Capitol Hill, warning that foreign governments likely will attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections.
Hundreds took to Twitter to decry the senator for blocking the bills. Democratic activist Scott Dworkin called McConnell “a traitor” and “an accomplice to the biggest traitor in American history — Donald Trump.”
McConnell called legislation requiring paper ballots and funding for the Election Assistance Commission partisan legislation. Paul Waldman gave a brief rundown of what Republicans worry would give Democrats an edge:
- Securing our voting systems from foreign hacking
- Allowing every American to vote
- Making it as easy as possible for Americans to vote
- Ensuring that all votes count equally
Let's not forget fiscal conservatives' fiscal conservatism. The House last week passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 that would add $300 billion to the Pentagon budget and add $1.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Democrats supported the measure to fund domestic spending, eliminate the "sequester," and avoid another debt-ceiling crisis. But while opposed by a majority of Republicans in the House, their Senate colleagues will pass and the president is expected to sign the two-year budget deal.
John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker that Trump, McConnell and other prominent Republicans' support proves "the G.O.P.’s devotion to fiscal conservatism was a sham, a cynical political strategy rather than the expression of a core philosophical principle." When Democrats are in control, holding down the debt requires drastic measures, etc., etc. When Republicans have control, deficit-increasing tax cuts that shrink the tax base are de rigueur. Cassidy provides a thumbnail sketch of how that went down the last time Democrats held the White House. Rest assured, Republicans will be born again into fiscal conservatism when next a Democrat sits in the Oval Office. "Waste, fraud, and abuse" will rise again as a euphemism for federal money flowing into wrong-colored Americans' pockets.
Meantime, the G.O.P. is employing every artifice at its disposal to monkey-wrench democracy and preclude results that don't leave them in charge of seeing that doesn't happen.
With an authoritarian con man occupying the Oval Office, the party now has a soulmate of president perfectly matched to their members' slipperier proclivities. Old euphemisms are falling away as politically incorrect and inauthentic anyway. They've thrown out old rules like not wearing white after Labor Day. With Trump as president, they can display their preference for white year-round.
