This Week in Statehouse Action: New Year, New Garbage Edition

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Well, shit.

Up until early afternoon on Wednesday, I thought we were only screwed in GOP-controlled statehouses all across the country.

But then a bunch of right-wing domestic terrorists stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol, and … well, we’re still screwed in GOP-controlled statehouses all across the country.

Just Peachy: With just a year to go until they draw themselves into newly safe seats, Republican lawmakers are wasting no time in making the most of the majorities they retained in state legislative chambers in November.

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• Everything from decrying the results of the presidential election to drafting new bills designed to make voting harder to refusing to seat duly elected Democratic members.
• … and it’s only the second week of January.

Keep your arms inside the car at all times and secure all loose items, folks. We’re in for a roller coaster ride from hell.

• The results of the Georgia runoff U.S. Senate elections were a brief bright spot this week before being snuffed out by Trump’s mob terrorizing the capitol because they can’t cope with the fact that democracy means that their side doesn’t always win.

Georgia is sending two whole Democrats to the U.S. Senate! That’s huge!

• And Georgia Republican lawmakers are bound and determined to prevent that from ever happening again.

I talk a lot about how the GOP uses gerrymandering to give themselves artificial majorities in their state legislatures and in the U.S. House.

But you can’t gerrymander a statewide election.

So how do Republicans keep Democrats from winning races for U.S. Senate, governor, and the like?

By

A. changing the rules of the game and

B. making themselves the referees of said game.

• In 2005, the Georgia legislature—controlled then, as now, by the GOP—passed a law allowing any registered voter to cast an absentee ballot, no excuse required.
  • As recently as 2018, more Republican voters—the elderly, often—tended to vote via this method than Democrats.
• But in 2020, use of at-will absentee voting jumped from 5% to 26%, and election results—Joe Biden winning the state and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock heading to the U.S. Senate—indicate that this shift benefited Democrats, and, well, Republicans just can’t have that.
  • So GOP lawmakers plan to pass bills requiring voters to claim a “valid” reason to vote absentee and prohibiting the mailing of absentee ballot applications to anyone who doesn’t specifically request one.
  • Republicans also want to ban ballot drop boxes (used this cycle to contend with the Trump-caused unreliability of the U.S. mail last fall) and require photo ID to vote by mail.
    • And because that’s not bad enough, GOP lawmakers also want to give themselves more power to oversee and administer elections.
      • GOP House Speaker David Ralston said this week that he’s “open” to moving elections oversight from the secretary of state’s office.

Not that the perennially Republican-controlled secretary of state’s office is much of a check on GOP lawmakers’ desires to make ballot box access more difficult, but still.

Keystone Kapers: It feels a little less dramatic at this point in the week, but in the long-ago time of Tuesday, Jan. 5, “hostile takeover” of a legislative chamber just meant that the Pennsylvania Senate’s GOP majority voted to remove Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman from his role as presiding officer of the chamber.

• Following the example of their party’s leader and our current president, Pennsylvania Republicans refused to seat the lawfully certified winner of an admittedly close election—a Democratic incumbent, total coincidence, I’m sure.

… No it wasn’t.

• Sen. Jim Brewster held off GOP challenger Nicole Ziccarelli by a mere 69 votes (nice).
• But a win is a win, and both the secretary of state and a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court validated that victory.
  • Ziccarelli has another lawsuit pending in federal court, but session is starting and it’s time to swear in the legislature.
    • Which is what Fetterman tried to do on Monday.
  • Yet Republicans first refused to seat their reelected colleague.
    • And then they voted to remove Fetterman when he refused to consider their unlawful motions to prevent Brewster’s swearing in.

Whether GOP lawmakers were violating the Pennsylvania constitution in doing so, however, is another matter.

• The wording in the document is clear: The state’s lieutenant governor “shall be President of the Senate.”
• So if Fetterman isn’t able to resume his constitutionally-mandated responsibility as the Pennsylvania Senate president, expect to see this in court.

But the likely futility both of removing the sitting lieutenant governor from his role presiding over the Senate and of preventing Brewster from taking his seat aren’t even the dumbest parts of this.

• You might expect this kind of jockeying when majority control of the chamber is on the line (Virginia House Democrats pulled some creative seating shenanigans to hold on to the speakership for one more term even after they’d lost the majority in the chamber after some special elections in 1998), but that’s not even a factor here.

After November’s elections, Republicans still control the Pennsylvania Senate 29-21. (Technically one member is independent, but he caucuses with the GOP.)

Seating Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster doesn’t in any way impact their hold on power in the chamber.

Republicans are refusing to swear him in to the office to which he was duly elected just because they can.

… Well, that’s not entirely true.

This is absolutely part of a party-wide effort all across the country to delegitimize the democratic process and its outcomes whenever it suits them.

• Watch for other emboldened Republican-controlled chambers in years to come to refuse to seat Democrats whose wins were under 500 votes—a margin that’s not particularly rare in state legislative elections.

So, yes, the chaos in Pennsylvania seemed dire until Trump’s mob executed a terrorist takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

And it still is. We can’t afford to become desensitized to Republican antics in statehouses.

Because some of those statehouse Republicans actually participated in the right-wing sacking of our seat of federal government.

• The list of GOP state legislators who travelled to Washington to participate in the domestic terrorism at the Capitol so far: 
  • Virginia Sen. (and gubernatorial candidate) Amanda Chase
  • West Virginia Del. Derrick Evans
  • Missouri Rep. Justin Hill
  • Tennessee Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver

But how many members were hanging out with Trump-supporting mobs closer to home?

• While none got to full Terrorist Occupation status, similar events were happening in tons of state capitols on Wednesday.
  • They spurred evacuations in two states.

Sigh.

So … yeah, 2021 isn’t off to the best start.

Dozens of states are convening their legislative sessions this month, so expect things to get worse before they get better.

And by worse, I mean GOP-controlled chambers pushing to make voting more difficult, draconian budget cuts (the economic impact of COVID-19 is taking huge bites out of state revenues), and concerted efforts by Republicans to thwart the Biden administration’s agenda at the state level.

… Oh, and then they get to draw themselves majority-cementing legislative district maps before the next round of elections to help protect them from blowback from unhappy voters.

Buckle up.

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