Dare We Expect A Blue Wave? Or Will Our Countrymen Surrender To The Allure Of Authoritarianism?

Like It Or Not, Our Fates Are Bound Together

In Florida, the government wants to take away many choices, not just women's health

Not many people are talking about a blue wave. But earlier we noted that political prognosticator Reid Holloway, who uses market data to make predictions, was pretty certain that Trump is going to lose big.not by the 7 million votes he lost by in 2020 but something in the range of 20 million in November. He also noted that both Florida and Texas could be up for grabs. There’s no path to a GOP win without both of them.

There are two paths to victory in Florida— Alan Grayson’s plan to register a million voters and the Democratic Party’s hope that if an abortion-protection constitutional amendment is on the ballot, enough Democrats will come out to vote to flip the state blue, not just giving Biden this crucial 30 electoral votes, but also ousting Rick Scott from the Senate and as many as half a dozen Republican members of the House (María Salazar, Laurel Lee, Cory Mills, Carlos Giménez, Anna Paulina Luna and Aaron Bean).

Nathaniel Weixel reported on the latest developments in the abortion ballot measure, which gathered more than enough signatures but has come up against an attempted road block by the DeSantis administration and is now in front of the state Supreme Court, almost totally DeSantis appointees. Nevertheless, wrote Weixel, they “appeared skeptical of the state’s arguments Wednesday that the language on a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights was misleading. Nathan Forrester, who argued on behalf of the state attorney general’s office, urged the court to disqualify the measure. He said voters won’t understand what the amendment will do because the language used to describe it was too broad and had an ‘enormously wide range of meanings.’ But several justices immediately questioned Forrester’s contention. The amendment may be sweeping in what it proposes, they said, but that’s an argument the state should make to voters, not the court.”

“It’s pretty obvious that this is an aggressive, comprehensive approach to dealing with this issue. The people of Florida aren’t stupid. They can figure this out,” Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz said.  

“It seems like to me all these things need to be argued about in the political process, because otherwise it’s a restriction on the substance of what can be proposed. We’re not given the power in the constitution to impose such a restriction,” Justice Charles Canady said. 

Muñiz noted it will likely be up to the court to determine the limits of the amendment if it passes. 

“There’s no possible way a summary could tick through all these different variables and possible implications… The summary says what it says. People can see for themselves if it’s too broad or vague or whatever,” Muñiz said.

Courtney Brewer, arguing on behalf of the initiative sponsor group Floridians Protecting Freedom, said the summary’s language was easy to understand. 

“There is no question that voters understand what viability means in the abortion context. This is a term and its meaning that have become a part of the cultural fabric of our nation,” she said.

Florida’s Supreme Court acts as a gatekeeper for ballot measures. Once a measure gathers enough signatures to qualify, the court is charged with determining that the language that will appear on the ballot is only about one subject and won’t confuse voters. The court is not supposed to rule on the merits of a measure.

…If a measure makes it to the ballot, it needs to reach a 60 percent threshold to be approved. Citizen-led ballot initiatives face a steep path to getting on the ballot, as the GOP-majority Legislature has changed requirements over the years to make it more difficult. 

This morning, Grayson, who’s running for the Senate from Florida, told me that "In Florida, as in many states, the right-wing legislature is completely out of step with the voters on the right to choose. The release valve that we have for that, here, is amendments to the State Constitution. Obviously, ballot initiatives can drive one party’s turnout, but more importantly, what they do is to prevent the legislature from ignoring We, the People. Florida Supreme Court review of proposed amendments has generally been apolitical up to now, and one can only hope that that remains that way."

On Wednesday, David Graham was certainly not thinking about a blue wave. He was thinking about the chaos another Trump term would bring and wrote that “With disarray on Capitol Hill, in the courts, and at the Republican National Committee, yesterday was a throwback to the vertiginous days of the Trump administration. Lots of data show that Americans aren’t paying close attention to politics or don’t believe Donald Trump will really be the Republican nominee, but each bit of Tuesday’s chaos had Trump’s fingerprints all over it— offering a partial preview of what life will be like if Trump is reelected in November.”

Trump’s speaker, MAGA Mike, “doesn’t have a grip on his caucus” and that chamber is even more chaotic and dysfunctional than it was under McCarthy. The inexperienced Johnson is speaker thanks to Trump, who cheered on conservative rebels against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and refused to save him,” wrote Graham. “Johnson’s rise was due in part to his starring role in attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Things are barely going better for the Senate Republican caucus. Over recent months, that group hatched what seemed like a clever plan to entrap Democrats. Rather than pass a bill with aid to Ukraine and Israel, which the White House as well as many GOP members wanted, it would tie those issues to tighter security at the southern border. That would force Democrats to support policies that the GOP wanted, or else to vote against them and face political blowback on immigration, Trump’s favorite campaign issue. But Democrats called the bluff. President Joe Biden and many of his allies said they’d embrace stronger border measures (to the noisy chagrin of some other members of the party). Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma led negotiations to create a bill that would garner bipartisan support. He had the backing of McConnell, a strong supporter of aid to Ukraine and Israel. This week, negotiators finally unveiled the bill. It was already on life support by the time it emerged: Trump made clear that he opposed the bill, because he and other Republicans didn’t want to give Biden a win on the border so close to the election. Johnson forecast the bill’s demise in the House, and it promptly gave up the ghost in the Senate as well. Biden immediately attacked Republicans for failing to pass border measures that they’d insisted were an existential need. The GOP had fallen into its own trap.”

[T]he Trump wing of the Republican Party isn’t interested in policy— it’s interested in sending signals. The MAGA crowd would rather impeach Mayorkas, even if they know he won’t be convicted and it won’t change anything, than enact a law that actually affects the border. The point is expression, not legislation.

Speaking of sending signals, Trump seems to have gotten his wish and deposed Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee. McDaniel was his own choice for the role in 2017, and she’s been a loyal backer. She even quit using her maiden name, Romney, when her uncle Mitt became one of Trump’s most implacable critic; after promising to stay neutral in this year’s presidential primary, she has pushed Trump challengers to drop out.

But Trump has become disenchanted with her for various reasons, including insufficient loyalty and insufficient enthusiasm about his claims of election fraud in 2020. That’s one reason he is reportedly favoring Michael Whatley, the RNC’s general counsel and chair of the North Carolina GOP, who has been a prominent proponent of election denial, to be her replacement.

Election denial is also at the heart of the former president’s prosecution in Washington, D.C., on four felony charges related to his attempts to subvert the 2020 election. Amid everything else, a federal appeals court yesterday roundly rejected his argument that he should be immune to prosecution, likely clearing the way for a trial to move forward. Trump’s arguments in that case were always a stretch, but one common motif of the Trump presidency was federal courts dismissing flimsy arguments mounted mostly for the sake of buying time. That, too, is back.

It’s exhausting. Surveying the wreckage last night, GOP Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina told the New York Times “The conservative base is going to have a real problem with this. And they should. The conservative base does not deserve this.” Norman is wrong, though. This is exactly what the conservative base has voted for and exactly what it deserves. Unfortunately for the rest of the country, everyone's fates are bound together.