America’s Very Good Boy (5/9/21)

Yesterday, we learned that Bo, the dog that lived in the White House with the Obama family for eight years, died of cancer. President Obama wrote: "Today our family lost a true friend and loyal companion. For more than a decade, Bo was a constant, gentle presence in our lives -- happy to see us on our good days, our bad days, and every day in between." That tweet, a similar one from Michelle Obama, and photos of Bo, made many of us tear up and some of us cry, and we wondered why. Here are some thoughts: We cried because Bo was, for at least 8 years, America's very good boy, and it felt like we were all losing a beloved family pet. But we also cried because Bo's tenure in the White House now feels like a distant memory of normal times that we worry may not come again anytime soon.

Yes, it is true that Joe Biden has restored a sense of normalcy and competence to the White House. He and Dr. Biden are also dog owners, unlike the former guy whose hostility to dogs and tendency to use the phrase “like a dog” to insult people were well documented. We applaud all the accomplishments of the Biden administration's first 100 days, including rolling out the vaccine so that we can all start returning to at least some parts of our lives after over a year of the disruption of the pandemic. And we are relieved that, at least for now, the Facebook oversight board has decided to continue to ban the former guy from its platform so that we are blessedly free of posts and tweets emanating from Mar-a-Lago.

But we also have to acknowledge that Bo’s time in the White House was part of the era before we realized that one of the two main political parties in this country was racing away from democracy and toward autocracy. Earlier in the week, many of us read Thomas Friedman's column, "Trump's Big Lie Devoured the G.O.P. and Now Eyes Our Democracy," which sent a chill through us: "We are not OK. America’s democracy is still in real danger. In fact, we are closer to a political civil war — more than at any other time in our modern history. Today’s seeming political calm is actually resting on a false bottom that we’re at risk of crashing through at any moment. Because, instead of Trump’s Big Lie fading away, just the opposite is happening — first slowly and now quickly."

Things have not gotten better since the January 6th assault on the Capitol. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the 2020 election was free and fair and that Joe Biden won both the popular vote and Electoral College decisively, Trump and his loyalists continue to perpetuate the Big Lie, and attempt to rig the system so that Trump-friendly forces will be in positions of power for future elections. Republican leaders are undermining democracy and charging ahead with disenfranchising voters and politicizing the process of election administration. There are 361 pieces of voter suppression legislation pending in statehouses across the country. State lawmakers continue to introduce new restrictive voting provisions, and voter suppressive bills in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Florida have already been signed into law. These laws include voter suppression tactics like making voter registration harder, restricting absentee voting, increasing voter ID laws, reducing early voting, decreasing ballot boxes, and even criminalizing giving water to voters waiting on long lines to vote. Many of these measures will have a disproportionate impact on voters of color, and on young voters. The Washington Monthly showed how turnout among young voters dramatically increased in 2020, but that the increased turnout was correlated to state laws expanding access to voting. Not surprisingly, many of these new Republican-drafted laws are specifically targeted at making it harder for young people to vote.

In addition, many bills seek to undermine the power of local officials. As election law attorney Marc Elias explains, these “bills also prevent the executive and judicial branches from changing any election laws—a transfer of some key powers of election administration from the executive branch to the legislature. This particular tactic is called ‘legislative seizure,’ and Republicans across the country have been eagerly pursuing it in an effort to restructure the balance of power in election administration and centralize control of elections within highly partisan state legislatures.” This is part of an overall power grab to put Trump and his loyalists in complete control of all the machinery of government.

Heather Cox Richardson encapsulated the growing threat in her Saturday newsletter, writing: "What is at stake in the Big Lie and all the Republican efforts to keep it in play—the shenanigans in the secret Maricopa County, Arizona recount; the censuring of Republicans who voted to impeach the former president; the expected removal of Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from a leadership role in the party; and so on—is not the past election of 2020, but the upcoming election of 2024."

Richardson makes clear that we are in the fight for the future of our country. She writes: “Is it really possible to think that in 2024, members of the new Trump party will protect the sanctity of any election that gives a victory to a Democratic candidate? If Republicans capture the House in 2022, will they agree to certify electoral votes for a Democrat? In 2020, even before the current remaking of the party in Trump’s image, 139 House Republicans contested them.”

Richardson and others have argued that the only thing standing between our democracy and the terrifying future outlined above is the For the People Act (H.R. 1 and S. 1) which would “sideline the new voter suppression bills and make it easier to vote . . . , end partisan gerrymandering and stop the flow of big money into elections permitted after the 2010 Citizens United decision.” MFD and our sister groups have sent postcards, texts, faxes, and emails to our Democratic Senators to urge them to pass the For the People Act but we need to do more. This Tuesday, we will hear from Susan Lerner, the Executive Director of Common Cause NY about her organization’s efforts to pass this democracy-saving legislation. We hope you join us on Tuesday to learn how grassroots groups like ours can keep up the pressure on lawmakers. This is not the time to take our feet off the proverbial gas pedal. As Robert Hubbell wrote: “we are in the thick of the fight; let’s act like it.”