Republicans can’t win free and fair national elections

So guess what they’re against?

“We’re a Republic not a democracy” means, in practice: “Reactionary judges should use the most aggressive forms of judicial review and statutory (mis)interpretation to implement right wing policy preferences that have been rejected by democratic majorities.”

This is going to become increasingly necessary, because one rare silver lining from the COVID-19 pandemic is that it’s going to be very hard to go back to the status quo ante in regard to voting, in which it was regarded as totally natural and even inevitable that certain people had to stand in line for many hours on a work day just to be able to cast a vote.

As of an hour ago, at least 52.48 million people had already voted. In Texas alone, the early vote is already equal to 71% of the total 2016 vote, and may well exceed 100% before election day. As of yesterday as many people in Harris County — nearly one million — had voted early as voted early in the course of the entire 2016 election: I’m told by knowledgeable observers of the Texas voting scene that if two million people vote early in Harris County, which now looks likely to happen, the chances of Biden winning the state are at least even money, if not better.

This is the Republican party’s nightmare: Too many people voting, or more precisely too many of Those People voting. This is why the first legislative act of a Democratic trifecta should be to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, while making it clear to the reactionary enemies of liberal democracy on the SCOTUS that this isn’t 2000 any more, and that trifling on their part will be dealt with ruthlessly.