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Democracy US-style ... November elections where Big Lie candidates abound ... Key states in the grip of Trump-nominated electoral officials ... Hundreds of new state laws to reshape the vote ... GOP plan for permanent minority government, with assistance from the Supreme Court ... Trouble in wait for Republicans' Pravda ... Roger Fitch's reports from our Washington bureau
President Biden has had a legislative victory, despite Democrats struggling with a small house majority and not-quite-majority senate. The upper house, in nominal Democrat control, has been held hostage by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
Republicans had come to rely on the two "Blue Dog" Democrats to obstruct Biden's legislative agenda, and were taken by surprise when the two voted for a reduced remnant of the key Democrat infrastructure bill, the optimistically-renamed Inflation Reduction Act.
There were liberal jokes that Manchin had shocked Republicans by revealing he's a Democrat, but the conservative Bulwark was all praise for Manchin's manoeuvres.
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The party pre-selections for this year's November elections are now largely complete in US states, and it's clear the paranoid fringe is becoming the party establishment in most Republican-controlled states, where Donald Trump's election-denying supporters have chosen the nuttiest, coup-supporting, election-liars among their party's appalling range of candidates - some of whom received covert Democrat assistance.
The Democrats' controversial gamble assumes that genuinely crazy "MAGA-loon" candidates will repel independent voters and be easier to defeat in November; Republicans meddle in Democrat primaries for opposite reasons, spending to defeat progressive opponents.
The tactic may be working for Democrats in deep-blue Maryland, where the craziest Republicans standing for governor and AG have won pre-selection, and it may work elsewhere, now that the contents of Donald Trump's safe have been revealed.
Already-tainted Republicans, like Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, perhaps the most detested US senator (after Ted Cruz) and an unashamed insurrectionist, could lose to a centre-left Democrat, Lt Governor Mandela Barnes, although Wisconsin remains emblematic of America's two-party decline.
There's a danger in newly-minted Republican cranks, e.g, in Pennsylvania, where the TV personality Dr Oz (Mehmet Oz) could win a senate seat.
Missouri's senate primary perplexed Trump cultists, as their hero couldn't decide which of two dreadful Erics to support: the disgraced former governor and wife-beater Eric Greitens, or the current AG, Eric Schmitt, who joined in frivolous and baseless lawsuits to overthrow the 2020 election - (Schmitt won).
A greater worry: the number of overtly partisan candidates for "secretaries of state", i.e, state election administrators. Big Lie candidates for such offices dominated this year's Republican primaries.
Using the "stolen elections" pretext, candidates for state election administrators obliquely promised to throw the November elections for Republicans, and many of these candidates won party pre-selection.
Alarmingly, Republicans in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania chose Big Lie candidates for offices that regulate or rule on elections, based on the hope they would conduct elections for the benefit of Republicans. These nominees will be well-placed to tamper with the presidential vote in 2024 if they win office this November.
Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano: the odd couple
In Pennsylvania, an actual participant in the January 6 insurgency, the bonkers Doug Mastriano, won the Republican nomination for governor, putting him in position to flip his state's electoral votes in 2024 to Trump or his surrogate.
As governor, Mastriano could appoint an elections "secretary of state" guaranteed to produce the results Republicans want; and as a January 6 insurrectionist, he ought to be barred from office under the 14th Amendment.
Kris Kobach won the Republican nomination for Kansas attorney general. Kobach previously served as a secretary of state, acquiring a reputation as perhaps the most partisan of state election officials. He was in constant strife with the Obama administration for his efforts to purge voters and unlawfully require proof of citizenship; he can be counted on for political mischief if elected.
Republicans sow distrust in elections themselves: some of their election officials cheat in their own party's primaries, refusing to certify results they find uncongenial, and the Big Lie candidates who lose claim Republican rivals cheated.
An (indicted) county clerk standing for Colorado secretary of state paid $250,000 for a recount of a primary election she lost by 14 points. She picked up 14 votes. So did her winning opponent.
In total, more than 100 Trump-endorsed Big Lie supporters will be Republican candidates for office in the November general elections. Some of them were Condorcet losers in an awful run-off system where the last one standing wins; the NYT reported on one such Congressional primary in Ohio.
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Manufacturing partisan and/or racist gerrymanders is standard practice in Republican legislatures and, surprisingly, ostensibly-independent judicial districting commissions can be hijacked by political parties.
Rusty Bowers: scalped
In Ohio, a Republican-controlled elections commission abetted substantial legislative gerrymanders. The US supreme court is allowing them to be used in this year's elections, despite Ohio's highest court finding the proposed electorates unconstitutional seven times. The Republican-aligned supreme court's abuse of interim orders (the "shadow docket") is to blame.
The ruling that the districts are unconstitutional still stands - for future elections.
Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana will also be allowed to use unconstitutionally-gerrymandered districts in November's election, leaving appeals to be sorted out in 2023. As election law expert Rick Hazen noted, "states are getting one free election before they have to change their rules".
It's a supreme court degradation of democracy that will only benefit Republicans in this year's elections.
With the US supreme court having effectively repealed most of the Voting Rights Act 1965, Republican jurisdictions are introducing a variety of racist voting restrictions, e.g, Georgia eliminated 75% of drop boxes in places where blacks live and attempt to vote.
In the run-up to November elections, Republican-ruled states have enacted over 100 new laws to penalise and shape voting. Sixty of them are felonies. More here.
There is one last strand in the Republicans' plot for permanent minority government: the spurious theory of "the independent state legislature". The supreme court will consider ISL in an October term case.
It's the astonishing, newly-invented, notion that a state legislature's electoral decisions take precedence over the state's executive government and its highest court's interpretation of the state constitution.
Some Republican legislative leaders such as house speakers remain honourable, and Donald Trump has accordingly attacked them, in Wisconsin, and in Arizona, where he has just obtained the scalp of Rusty Bowers, the state's Speaker of the House who testified before the January 6 house committee.
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America's Pravda
In the wake of a new book on Republican destructionists and the religious nuttery that fuels it, some media are revisiting the sources of today's malevolent Republicanism: the 1994 rise of Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 Brooks-Brothers Riot.
Big-Lie-backing media are beginning to suffer for their loyal Trumpism: the rightwing network One America seems headed for the ditch, more here, and a long-overdue reckoning for the Republican Pravda, Fox News, may be at hand.
Perhaps too late, Rupert Murdoch has trimmed his sails, ending Trump-promotions on Fox and turning both the upmarket Wall Street Journal and seedy NY Post against Trump's crimes.
