People, Not Parchment

 

Democracy is only as good as the people in it. Parchmented prescriptives have no plenary power. If it’s possible to enforce the law when individuals are involved, a two-party system crumbles when one party chooses to ignore it, as policy. Which is what’s happening now, and has been for decades of Republican devolution; turned to eleven since the “election” of Trump; more so after his subsequent fraud-free, Constitutionally-certified loss.

Alabama’s legislature and governor have brought home the truth of it. Ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States to redraw their racially gerrymandered voting districts, mandating that, in a state in which Blacks represent over twenty-five percent of the population, they must create at least two, not the current one Black-majority district, they defiantly refused. “We know our state better than people in Washington,” paraphrased their governor, confederately. “We,” by the way, are these people.

In refusing the order, Alabama bird-fingered their Trump-friendly, carefully constructed, Constitution-ignoring, law-reversing, bench-legislating Court. Their lack of power to enforce their rulings now exposed, the reactionary majority on SCOTUS had previously considered themselves free to make whatever untethered rulings for which they were appointed, because they could. And because they knew that, unlike today’s Trumpublicans and their blood-red statehouses, Democrats, believing in Constitutional governance, would comply. They being the good people in our democracy, as referenced in this column’s opening statement.

Picking up the baton of belligerence, Texas Governor Abbott refused a DOJ order to remove his deadly and clearly illegal floating barricades from the Rio Grande. As far from constitutional conservatism as they are from the moon, today’s Republicans act as if the only laws that apply are those with which they agree. And they’ve convinced their self-pitying acolytes to feel the same. Whatever their leaders do is okay, as long as it “sticks it to” the right people. 

They won’t have to bother much longer, as both Trump and DeSantis promise to “eliminate liberalism.” Not yet clarified is how; but America may not have enough prison camps and gas chambers when they do. Maybe they’ll enslave liberals and teach them life skills. MAGA.

Trumpism is devoted to convincing white, metaphorically-cuckolded males that voting for Trump will provide vengeance for their inevitable loss of primacy. Constantly bombarded by lies about turning their kids gay, mutilating them and changing their gender, about educational brainwashing and woke Mickeys, happy to have their kids grow up lacking knowledge of history and science, they welcome the Trumpic march to oligarch-funded, scapegoat-blaming autocracy. Conjoined not in spite of; because of.

Nor are they able to see what’s behind this relentless march: string-pulling polluters and carbon producers seeking free rein, through their paid-for judges and wholly-owned congress-dwellers, to lie about and ignore the most critical problem we face as humans: climate change. Too conspiratorial? Follow the money, as they say. As long as they can despoil for profit, they’ll keep bankrolling MAGA Republicans and their leader, a lying, law-breaking, despot-emulating, climate-change-denying deceiver. 

And so it goes: Simultaneously railing against “liberal cancel-culture,” Trumpists are boycotting Bud Lite for its one-time, blink-and-it’s-gone online ad featuring transgendered Dylan Mulvaney.  Appearing so briefly that approximately none could have seen its original posting, it drove them calculatedly crazy. And now, the greatest outrage of them all, so existentially ominous that Ted Cruz, unconcerned for people in his state dying from heat stroke, ERs flooded with the not-yet-dead, and people drowning under Abbott’s death-buoys, has declared righteous war on it: THE BARBIE MOVIE. Top of the list. Fox “news” stars are all in, too.

An unapologetically racist and misogynist right-wing icon, Ben Shapiro filmed himself barbequing Barbies and their accouterments. This was after seeing the movie and noting that the audience was only six- to eight-year-old girls and their young mothers. Was his anger the only thing rising? Performative indignation notwithstanding, the movie is breaking box-office records.

As inexplicable as undying support for Trump, MAGA folk continue to fall for those distractions, swallowing lies about open borders, failing economy, rising crime. In fact, America’s economic recovery is dramatically more robust than anywhere in the world; manufacturing is so strong that Morgan Stanley, explicitly crediting Bidenomics, has revised upward their predictions of GDP growth. 

Following President Biden’s policies on asylum, illegal border crossings are at their lowest in two years; interdictions of drugs are at all-time highs. Murder is down nine-percent over last year; all violent crime is declining. Inflation, which, at its worst, was never as high as Europe’s, is now a third of what it was. Unemployment is at historical lows; rising wages are outpacing inflation, consumer confidence is soaring. Thousands of infrastructure projects are under way, creating millions of jobs. 

Facing factuality, Republican leaders have realized that defeating Joe Biden requires lies and distractions, voter suppression, and financing stealth third parties. And, sure, why not: impeachment, solid as cotton candy.