When the Senate minority leader of the United States calls something “a genuine threat to our country,” everyone — regardless of party — should listen. Even in the era of overheated language, that kind of declaration is not to be taken lightly.
So what horrible menace to our way of life was Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., talking about when he recently uttered those words? Communism? Al-Qaeda?
No — he was referring to democracy.
That sounds hard to believe, but it’s absolutely true.
In a speech last week to The Heritage Foundation, McConnell used that jeremiad about an existential “threat” to describe a grassroots effort aimed at electing presidents via a national popular vote.
Prompted by frustration with swing states’ disproportionate power, the national popular vote idea is elegant in its simplicity. States commit their Electoral College votes to the national popular vote-winner, regardless of the outcome of the presidential contest within their boundaries. When a majority of Electoral College votes sign onto the compact, America finally gets what should be a fundamental democratic guarantee — the guarantee that our president is the candidate who received the majority of votes.
To most readers, that seems like a non-ideological no-brainer — it means every vote is equally important, regardless of geography. And why shouldn’t it be that way? After all, there’s no moral or substantive reason that a vote in liberal Denver should be more valued by a presidential election system than a vote in rural Idaho just because the Denver vote was cast in the swing-state of Colorado.
Yet, McConnell billed the accelerating national popular vote campaign as a nefarious liberal plot. Such paranoia highlights the fact that the GOP is now openly fighting against the most basic of democratic ideals.
In the states, this onslaught has been unselfconsciously overt.
As civil rights lawyer Judith Browne Dianis told CNN, “Through a spate of restrictive laws passed in Republican-led legislatures, a disproportionate number of African-Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, the elderly and the young will find voting difficult and in many cases impossible.”
These statutes, she notes, “require a state photo ID to vote, limit early voting, place strict requirements on voter registration and deny voting rights to Americans with criminal records who have paid their debt to society.”
Now, with 132 electoral votes signing onto the national popular vote compact, there’s the real possibility of more democratic presidential elections. So the highest-ranking Republican in America is mobilizing the opposition.
Taken together, this coordinated war on democracy leads to a frightening question: Why is it being waged?
Republicans claim they are moved by (totally unproven) fears of rampant voter fraud, but their obvious motivation is authoritarian self-interest. With polls showing the party’s policy goals wholly out of line with public attitudes, the GOP is trying to limit the public’s democratic rights.
Such fanatical ends-justify-the-means-ism was once the exclusive hallmark of foreign banana republics. Should our own Banana Republicans succeed in their assault on democracy, that’s exactly the kind of backward country America will become.
David Sirota hosts the morning show on AM760 radio. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter: @davidsirota.
