by Michael O'Neill

MICHAEL O’NEILL describes a democracy at risk as Donald Trump continues to lead the Republican Party

A year after the Storming of the Capitol by Trump Republicans, Donald Trump is still the leader of the party. None of the people responsible with him for planning and organising the violent attempted coup have been held accountable. As if emboldened by their good fortune, the Republican Party, in States they control, has shamelessly remade election laws a vehicle to disenfranchise people of colour and other groups who generally vote Democrat. At the same time, they ensured that Republican operatives alone would control the process of counting votes.

Over sixty per cent of Republicans tell pollsters they believe Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president – Trump’s ‘Big Lie’, the cherry on the cake of thirty thousand lies the Washington Post’s lie-tracker verified over the course of his four-year term. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the Senate dithered over the two bills that Democrats in the House of Representatives had passed that would have restored the Voting Rights Act and federal constitutional control of federal elections.

The two Democratic Senators, Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who obstructed Joe Biden’s climate crisis and social welfare bill, refused to join the other 48 Democratic Senators and pass legislation the day after Martin Luther King Jr’s federal holiday in the middle of January. The legislation would have restored the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 2013, a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion, removed an enforcement condition. It had required States which historically had discriminated against African Americans’ right to vote to pass scrutiny by the federal Department of Justice for any changes they wanted to make in their election laws. This was to prevent unconstitutional discrimination. In the cavalier manner to which Republican Supreme Court Justices have increasingly become accustomed, as well as the hypocrisy of claiming they are ‘strict constructionists’ and not ‘activist judges’, they disregarded the longstanding and for ever continuing election shenanigans in the deep South, declared that things had changed, so it was time to let the condition lapse. This past year’s collection of blatantly racial discriminatory election laws has demonstrated the total fallacy of the 2013 decision.

In the same manner, Manchin and Sinema, disregarding the fact that the notorious Senate filibuster, a relic of the anti-Civil Rights era, requiring 60 votes to pass legislation in the 100- seat Senate, had previously been cast aside over 160 times, and for much less important issues than election subversion, used it to hide their outrageous thumbing their noses at their 48 Democratic colleagues. They were trying to prevent the Republican Party from stealing future elections.

January 6 events

 The Select Committee in the House of Representatives investigating the January 6 events in the Capitol have already added to our knowledge of the conspiracy. Their introductory hearing which featured four of the police officers who confronted the insurrectionists was impressive, auguring well for the public hearings likely to begin in April. By contrast, the Department of Justice led by Merrick Garland seems so far to be sleepwalking, an impression confirmed by legal experts like Laurence Tribe. They state the obvious point that the evidence of a conspiracy to commit sedition and insurrection, and the violent carrying out of that conspiracy, is overwhelming. I have never seen as much video of an historical event like this one, and I don’t think I have seen it all. It was not hundreds but thousands of insurrectionists. All the ringleaders, beginning with Trump, need to be prosecuted and convicted.

In this regard, I recommend the book by Trump’s consigliere, Michael Cohen, Disloyal: A Memoir, (New York, 2020). Cohen is the only member so far of Trump’s inner circle to come forward and confess his own complicity and wrongdoing. I was first impressed by his frank testimony before Congress, and by the same tone in his book. The final chapter, Epilogue: Retaliation, deserves an investigation and prosecution on its own of those in the Trump Justice Department led by Bill Barr. He used an unconstitutional violation of the right to publish his book to send Cohen back to prison for a violation of his probation, which was found to be an illegal retaliatory measure and overturned by a federal judge a couple of weeks later. Mary Trump, Donald’s niece, did America and the world a favour in her first book, Too much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (New York, 2020), by describing the family trauma caused by her sociopathic grandfather, particularly as it affected her Uncle Donald. I like to think perhaps she warned off some people from voting to re-elect him in 2020.

Her second book, The Reckoning (New York, 2021), is her attempt to come to terms with the US national historical trauma, once more manifested in the pandemic and after the George Floyd murder, exacerbated by the corrupt and immoral policies of her uncle’s administration. She does a favour for everyone, here and elsewhere, not inclined to ‘read the tomes’, but interested in learning from American history and respected historians a credible synopsis by a personable and competent person.

Historical tomes

I’ll only reference two examples of ‘the tomes’. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson (New York, 2020) has been widely recommended, and not just for U.S. readers, because it draws on the experience of other countries like India and Germany. I have read it and call it a classic The second example is a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Frederick Douglass by Yale University historian David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York, 2018). The first six or seven chapters of Frederick Douglass’ own second of three biographies, My Bondage and My Freedom, is the most striking and overpowering account of slavery I have ever come across.

I’m afraid American democracy is at serious risk, as demonstrated in my limited review. I believe unless a lot more Americans, one way or another, learn from these present and historical sources, that risk will be unavoidable.