This screed by Excitable Zach Beauchamp, one of the crazier folks at Vox, is an attempt to dunk on Republicans, but, hits Democrats right in the nads
RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy
For much of this fall, Americans have fretted about a legitimacy crisis surrounding the 2020 election. But now, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the hypocritical Republican rush to fill her seat in an election year, it’s clear that the crisis is here.
Liberal democracy only functions when major parties accept the right of their opponents to govern. The purpose of the system is to take the antagonism that defines politics everywhere and channel it, creating rules and establishing norms that prevent one segment of the population from crushing others’ ability to participate in and shape the system.
Democrats have been bleating about the legitimacy of the 2016 election even before it happened. They questioned the 2000 and 2004 elections because they lost. They’ve refused to accept the right of Trump and the Republican led Senate to govern. The purpose of the filibuster in the Senate is to keep the majority from running roughshod over the minority party, yet, they threaten to get rid of it.
The rest of the piece is an attempt to say “Republicans bad, Democrats good”, yet, Democrats still won’t accept the results of the 2016 election, won by the rules, and want to get rid of the Electoral College. To the ending
This is terra incognita. The fairness of our elections has come under fundamental question, as has the Court that’s supposed to provide legal redress in exactly this kind of dispute. There is no road map for what may lie ahead, and getting out of it will require a genuine reckoning with what got us here — that one of our major parties has spent decades convincing itself that its rival wielding power is an unacceptable catastrophe.
What this is really all about is delegitimizing the Supreme Court, particularly if Trump gets his next pick through before election day, and to set the stage to challenge the results if they lose, blaming Republicans and Trump for cheating. Sure sounds like they are very worried about Handsy Joe, eh?
