Corruption ring wow9/14/2023 They could have tried to expand instead, they’ve hardened and walled themselves off. Demography can take a long time to change-longer than in progressives’ dreams-but it isn’t on the Republicans’ side. Today’s Republican Party has cornered itself with a base of ever older, whiter, more male, more rural, more conservative voters. In rendering voters voiceless, it pushes everyone closer to the use of undemocratic means. It destroys the compact between the people and the government. The fact that no plausible election outcome can check the abuse of power is what makes political corruption so dangerous. In Wisconsin, a purple state, that means close to 60 percent of the total vote. Nothing can stop these abuses short of an electoral landslide. Even if the courts overturn some of these power grabs, as they have in North Carolina, Republicans will remain securely entrenched in the legislative majority through their own hyper-gerrymandering-in Wisconsin last month, 54 percent of the total votes cast for major-party candidates gave Democrats just 36 of 99 assembly seats-so they will go on passing laws to thwart election results. Republican majorities are rushing to pass laws that strip away the legitimate powers of newly elected Democratic governors while defeated or outgoing Republican incumbents are still around to sign the bills. Sykes: Wisconsin Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot * But there’s no obvious remedy for what the state legislatures of Wisconsin and Michigan, following the example of North Carolina in 2016, are now doing.Ĭharles J. There are legal remedies for Duncan Hunter, a representative from California, who will stand trial next year for using campaign funds to pay for family luxuries. Political corruption usually trails financial scandals in its wake-the foam is scummy with self-dealing-but it’s far more dangerous than graft. It isn’t about dirty money so much as the pursuit and abuse of power-power as an end in itself, justifying almost any means. It isn’t an occasional failure to uphold norms, but a consistent repudiation of them. The corruption I mean has less to do with individual perfidy than institutional depravity. Richard Nixon’s administration was also riddled with criminality-but in 1973, the Republican Party of Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, and John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was still a normal organization. So is vote theft of the kind we’ve just seen in North Carolina-after all, the alleged fraudster employed by the Republican candidate for Congress hired himself out to Democrats in 2010.Īnd I don’t just mean that the Republican Party is led by the boss of a kleptocratic family business who presides over a scandal-ridden administration, that many of his closest advisers are facing prison time, that Donald Trump himself might have to stay in office just to avoid prosecution, that he could be exposed by the special counsel and the incoming House majority as the most corrupt president in American history. Those abuses are nonpartisan and always with us. I don’t mean the kind of corruption that regularly sends lowlifes like Rod Blagojevich, the Democratic former governor of Illinois, to prison. The party is best understood as an insurgency that carried the seeds of its own corruption from the start. Why has the Republican Party become so thoroughly corrupt? The reason is historical-it goes back many decades-and, in a way, philosophical.
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