The House Democrats’ proposal would have gone a long way towards protecting voting rights vis-a-vis COVID-19.

For our Democracy: Ensures that states can carry out this year’s election with billions in grant funding for states through the Election Assistance Commission and a national requirement for both 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail, including mailing a ballot to all registered voters in an emergency.

During an interview last Monday in his personal “safe space” on Fox and Friends, The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote responded to that proposal, addressing exactly none of the substance of the matter, and focused only on how the measures might affect his political fate.

x Trump openly admitting if we made voting easier in America, Republicans wouldn't win elections



Trump: "The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again." pic.twitter.com/x5HmX6uogo — Lis Power (@LisPower1) March 30, 2020

And yeah, Trump actually did call these eminently reasonable steps “crazy.” Other Republicans have expressed similar sentiments, including the sociopath from Kentucky who single-handedly forced hundreds of his House colleagues to travel to Washington to cast a vote in person on the coronavirus stimulus bill because, well, he felt like it.

x Universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it. https://t.co/NSqodOXsxx — Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 24, 2020

Down in Georgia, in response to a decision by the Republican Secretary of State—to his credit—to send out applications to vote absentee to all of the state’s voters, the state House Speaker David Ralston did his best Trump impression.

x The Speaker of the Georgia state House doesn't like mailing voters absentee ballots during the virus outbreak. Why? Because he says it will hurt conservative Republicans by driving up turnout. https://t.co/wsWxkLOvrB pic.twitter.com/u1kU5axCRb — Jamie Dupree (@jamiedupree) April 2, 2020

The Peach State wants to give every registered voter the means to safely exercise this most sacred democratic right. How dare they?

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz—the imbecile who wore a gas mask on the House floor to vote on coronavirus legislation—claimed to have uncovered the real truth behind Democrats’ push to expand voting by mail: “It's perhaps Joe Biden's failures as a candidate that animate the left's desire to get these vote-by-mail provisions in coronavirus legislation.” The reality is that Gaetz’s lies represent the usual Republican projection: They don’t want high voter turnout because they're afraid they can’t win without suppressing the vote. Don’t take my word for it, just scroll back up and remind yourself what Trump, Ralston, et. al have publicly admitted.

Please don’t think Trump invented this idea. Far from it. Paul Weyrich is a name you should know if you want to understand the modern conservative movement. He’s the one who came up with the term “moral majority” to describe a group of people who are neither moral nor the majority. Weyrich also co-founded the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). He is arguably the most important behind-the-scenes player responsible for the direction of today’s Republican Party.

In 1980, Weyrich presented, in stark terms, his ideas on the purpose of elections and whether it is important to ensure that every voter is able to exercise their right to cast a ballot.

I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of [the] people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

For Weyrich, elections had one purpose: to elect people he supported, i.e., conservative Republicans. That concept is behind Republicans’ nationwide push to suppress the vote with burdensome, arbitrarily applied voter ID laws that disproportionately affect young voters (for example, student IDs don’t count, but gun licenses do), older voters, poor voters, and Americans of color.

Weyrich’s concept of suppression also undergirds the blatant attempt in Florida to overturn the will of voters—65% of whom voted in 2018 to adopt a constitutional amendment to allow former felons to vote once they’ve completed their sentences. In response, the Republican governor—Trump ally Ron DeSantis—and the Republican legislature instituted in 2019 what amounts to a modern-day poll tax to stop most of those 1.4 million newly eligible voters from casting a ballot. We’ve recently seen more progress in the court fight against this law, so hopefully it will not apply in the 2020 election.

As I’ve written before, this cynical approach to elections underlies the Republican Party’s massive push to gerrymander electoral districts so badly that in Wisconsin, for example, Democrats won an eight-point popular vote victory statewide for the Assembly in 2018, yet Republicans won 63 seats out of 99.

That same Republican-dominated Wisconsin state legislature—despite having no popular mandate—has most recently opposed the push by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to postpone the April 7 elections and to have everyone vote by mail. The New York Times Editorial Board characterized the Republicans’ actions as “insane, and utterly unnecessary.” This Republican refusal to postpone elections comes in a state where residents were told to shelter in place. Of all the states scheduled to hold an election in April, only Wisconsin failed to either move to voting by mail or change to a later date. That’s no coincidence.

The April 7 vote in Wisconsin was not only a primary to decide on the parties’ nominees for various offices. In addition to large numbers of general elections for local positions on the ballot, voters were also choosing between a progressive and a conservative for a vitally important seat on the State Supreme Court. If you want to know why Republicans are fighting so insanely to hold this in-person election, it’s because they want to win that seat.

Holding the election this Tuesday, as Daily Kos Elections’ Stephen Wolf explained, gives them the best chance of doing so—not least because of this fact: “In Wisconsin's biggest city of Milwaukee, which is a Democratic stronghold and home to a majority of its black population, officials slashed the number of in-person polling places from 180 to just five, or one location for every 10,000 voters expected to vote in-person on Tuesday.”

The day before the election, Evers took protecting the public health into his own hands and, via executive order, postponed the election until June 9, despite a lower court having previously ruled he could not do so. The conservative-dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court overruled Evers shortly thereafter. As Satya Rhodes-Conway, mayor of capitol city Madison, put it: "Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong with this election, not because of the pandemic, but because of cruel choices made by Republican politicians and their pet judges."

x Unbelievable. WisconsinÃ¢ÂÂs hyper-partisan Supreme Court is barreling ahead with a reckless election that is certain to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. To find your polling place #Madison please use this map. https://t.co/ny7NBaA0jJ — Mayor of Madison (@MayorOfMadison) April 6, 2020

Just hours before Election Day, the United States Supreme Court, doing the bidding of Wisconsin Republicans, went one further and reversed a lower court ruling that would have given voters six extra days to submit their absentee ballots. The election went on and, unsurprisingly, long lines were the order of the day—in particular in urban areas.

x This feels like an era-defining image pic.twitter.com/rgEwnhmk8O — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 7, 2020

In other words, things went exactly according to (the Republican) plan. Wisconsin’s Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes pulled no punches when he summed up the situation on Tuesday.

x Good morning and welcome to the Shit Show! TodayÃ¢ÂÂs episode has been produced by the Supreme Court and directed by the incomparable Speaker and Senate Majority leader duo.



Buckle up, this oneÃ¢ÂÂs sure to disappoint! — Mandela Barnes (@TheOtherMandela) April 7, 2020

Recall that in Ohio, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine unilaterally pushed back the March 17 primary election; we didn’t hear Republicans complaining because that election was all about primaries—there were no opportunities for a Republican to beat a Democrat. There’s no principle behind Republican machinations in Wisconsin, other than—as I wrote recently in a post about Republicans packing the federal judiciary under Trump—the principle that anything goes in the pursuit of power.

To return to gerrymandering, in neighboring Michigan, journalist David Daley argues that Republican gerrymandering was so extreme that it directly led to the poisoning of the water in Flint: “Republicans had effectively insulated themselves from the voters through redistricting. School kids drank poisoned water, in part, as a result of uncompetitive seats that effectively locked in an enduring minority rule.”

Gerrymandering has long been a part of American politics, although the Republican effort to use the 2010 round of redistricting went beyond anything seen before, and has given them a significant advantage—which continues right up to today—when it comes to winning more seats than the number of votes they earned would justify.

x Several states remained extremely gerrymandered even after 2018. North Carolina, Ohio, & Texas GOP gerrymandering likely cost Dems 10-13 seats collectively. Just looking at Ohio, Dems likely would have won 4 more seats in 2018 with a nonpartisan map: https://t.co/HRwYfJnvuq pic.twitter.com/1d1X7EIIHj — Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) March 26, 2019

It would be understandable if Democrats, in particular after winning control of a number of state governments in 2018—and they’d have won even more but for the unfairness of the districts Republicans drew after 2010—decided that turnabout was fair play and started planning to gerrymander wherever they could after 2020. Yet in Virginia, Democrats did the opposite.

Virginia Democrats this year used their recent takeover of the state legislature, combined with control of the governor’s mansion, not to gerrymander but to actually strengthen the integrity of future elections, by creating a bipartisan commission to draw the state’s electoral districts. Rather than use their newly-won power to cement their control of the commonwealth, Democrats (virtually all of them in the Senate of Virginia and enough of them in the House of Delegates) voted for the creation of the commission along with Republicans—who had just lost power the previous November, and so had every reason to support it. The contrast between the actions taken by Virginia Democrats and Wisconsin Republicans in just the past few weeks exemplifies perfectly the difference between prioritizing the fairness of the process by which we choose our leaders, and gaming that process to give one’s own party the edge.

Jesse Wegman, who has written widely about the undemocratic elements of our election systems (including in his recent book calling for the abolishment of the Electoral College) strongly praised Virginia Democrats.

As the nation approaches a new round of districting in 2021, lawmakers everywhere — especially Republicans, who’ve been drunk on their own mapmaking power for a decade — should take a lesson from Virginia’s Democrats and lay down their pens. It may take more work to win elections by listening to what voters actually want than by simply rigging the maps, but it’s a critical step to save our representative democracy.

The Trump campaign, however, shows no signs of sobering up, as Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports.

President Donald Trump’s political operation is launching a multimillion-dollar legal campaign aimed at blocking Democrats from drastically changing voting rules in response to the coronavirus outbreak. In the past several weeks, the reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee have helped to oversee maneuvering in a handful of battleground states with an eye toward stopping some Democratic efforts to alter voting laws, and to bolster Trump. The mobilization is being closely coordinated with Republicans at the state and local levels. The Trump campaign and RNC are actively engaged in litigation in Wisconsin, where the parties are at loggerheads over an array of issues including voter identification, and in New Mexico, where the battle involves vote-by-mail. The skirmishing has also spread across key states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, where the well-organized Trump apparatus has fought over changes that could sway the outcome of the election.

Trump’s forces are reportedly willing to consider mailing absentee ballot applications to all voters … over age 65, that is. Could that possibly be because in 2016 Trump won voters 65 and older by a nine point margin—better than he did with any other age group? I know, I know, I’m so cynical. To be serious, although older Americans are more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus (and Fox News), everyone is supposed to be social distancing. Why should only older voters automatically receive absentee ballot applications in the mail?

Presumptive nominee Joe Biden last week pushed back hard against Trump’s unprincipled and unsafe stance against making elections safer while preserving wide access to the vote. On MSNBC, he rightly urged Americans to recognize the need to change how we cast our ballots: “[Voting] may have to be different … a great deal more absentee balloting.” When asked if all 50 states should implement measures to guarantee “secure, remote voting,” Biden responded: “Yes, I think they should be doing that now.”

Additionally, Biden condemned the aforementioned whining from Trump on Fox and Friends, calling it “absolutely ridiculous.” The former vice president continued: “This is about making sure that we're able to conduct our democracy while we're dealing with a pandemic. We can do both […] There's a lot of ways to do it, but we should be talking about it now.”

Trump, on the other hand, would be more than happy to use the pandemic to drive down voter turnout. Last Friday, he dismissed out of hand the need for voting by mail this November, with language that reflected a complete lack of understanding of what the country faces: "It should be you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself.” Does that sound as inappropriate to you as it does to me?

Biden, to make the contrast with Trump even clearer, should make a full-throated push for nationwide voting by mail. (He can even sign on to Daily Kos’s petition—and so can you.)

There is plenty of time between now and Election Day to establish a secure voting-by-mail process that ensures no one has to choose between their health and their right to vote.

When it comes to election processes, Republicans determine the correctness of a given proposal solely by whether it helps them win, by whether it will increase the power they wield. Don’t forget: Trump just told us that helping people to vote by mail—during a pandemic, no less—is bad because it might hurt his party.

Trump’s attitude can be summed up as follows: Democracy for thee, but not for me. Joe Biden needs to call him out on it, and pledge to always put the integrity of our elections above partisan gain. Protecting voter rights is not only the right thing to do—it may well swing a few independents Biden’s way come November.

The Republican Party and its leaders are supposed to protect and defend our democratic system of government—all elected officials swear an oath along those lines. However, it certainly appears that the GOP believes it's supposed to work the other way around: that the purpose of our democracy is merely to protect and defend Republicans’ hold on political power.

The time has come for voters—even those who may agree with Republicans on particular issues—to disabuse them of these notions. Protecting and defending democracy must come first. If Republicans reject that principle, then voters must reject them.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)