Biden won, but the fate of democracy still uncertain

The inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris last week will help to reset an unbalanced nation. But the armed camp in which they took their oaths is testament to the precarious state of democracy in America.
The loss of democratic muscle in the US over the past four years has been precipitous. It wasn’t simply the election of a corrupt and incompetent demagogue to the presidency in 2016; the degradation was a group effort. Donald Trump’s presidency hatched from the extremism of the Republican Party, and the party, freed by Trump from pretensions of conservative disposition, accompanied his descent. The nadir, for now at least, was reached with the violent attempted coup at the Capitol.
There have been signs of a vigorous response. Many corporations paused contributions to Republicans who voted to advance Trump’s electoral coup. Mainstream news media appeared
more willing to acknowledge the contemporary GOP’s authoritarianism.
Some Republican officials, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Representative Liz
Cheney of Wyoming, took courageous stands against oft-repeated lies.
But a democratic rebound is by no means guaranteed. And while good policy and successful governance over the next couple years might strengthen democracy’s hand, “good policy is good politics” is no longer a sure recipe, if it ever was. Tens of millions of Americans view the simplest facts through a distorted partisan lens. Many seem to prefer the opposing team’s failure to the nation’s success.
Strengthening America’s battered democracy will require continued efforts across a range of distinct yet related realms — legal, political and cultural. They will meet fierce opposition in each. Most of the energy and money in democratic capacity has gone into the legal arena. The focus is understandable. From the Reconstruction amendments that sought to end the terrorisation of Black Americans to the civil liberties jurisprudence of the 20th century that sought to secure individual and equal rights, law has been democracy’s sidekick — albeit not always a reliable one. Pro-democracy groups, such as the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, and Protect Democracy, a Washington-based group founded in 2017 as the Trumpist threat came into focus, are staffed by lawyers and others who seek to strengthen laws and norms. The law, said Protect Democracy executive director Ian Bassin, is “supposed to keep the lava in” and prevent political explosion.
As voter suppression and gerrymandering have become integral to Republican efforts to retain power without majority support, a legal network of partisans and nonpartisans has emerged to challenge anti-democratic laws. Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias fielded lawyers across the nation in the wake of November’s election, where they racked up dozens of court victories against Trump’s evidence-free claims. The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has become a regular party to lawsuits challenging Republican efforts to obstruct registration and restrict voting, as has the American Civil Liberties Union. By removing contests over voter fraud from the media, where news organisations have typically presented it as a disputed reality, to the courtroom, these lawyers forced the propagandists to produce actual evidence. They had none.
Democratic members of Congress, many of whom are lawyers, responded to Republican transgressions with legal remedies of their own. In 2019, the House of Representatives passed HR 1, a massive overhaul of voting rights and election administration. That bill has been revived in this Congress. It would blunt efforts to restrict voting and to gerrymander legislative districts. It calls for automatic voter registration and easier voting, and it makes it more difficult for states to purge voters from registration lists, a tactic employed in Florida, Georgia and other states to reduce Democratic votes. To bolster voting rights against a Supreme Court that has undermined them, it calls for restoration of “protections for voters against practices in States and localities plagued by the persistence of voter disenfranchisement.”
To battle egregious gerrymandering in states such as Wisconsin, where Republicans command a large majority of seats on the basis of a minority of votes, the bill requires states to use independent redistricting commissions, with members drawn randomly from both partisan and independent pools of candidates, to draw congressional districts. The bill also provides funds for enhanced election security, and it would restructure the Federal Election Commission in an effort to make the broken commission a functional cop on elections beat.
Another bill, the Protecting Our Democracy Act, offers a litany of defensive maneuvers against crimes and ethics violations that Trump committed. It seeks to prevent abuse of the pardon power, which Trump wielded to reward criminal confederates, and codifies the Constitution’s emoluments clause to prevent a president from, among other things, funneling domestic or foreign funds to his businesses. The law would also strengthen Congress’s hand against a rogue executive, protecting whistle blowers and executive-branch inspectors general and codifying Congress’s power to subpoena executive personnel to investigate wrongdoing and incompetence.
Passing such laws, and others, likely requires eliminating the filibuster, which enables a minority of 41 senators to block legislation.

—Bloomberg

Francis Wilkinson writes about US politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was
previously executive editor of the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a
political media strategist