Beyond Lame Ducks
Throughout Michigan, people are rallying to challenge the Lame Duck actions of the state legislature. Protest, public demonstrations, and outright mockery are tactics being deployed against a secure, smug legislative body. Many groups are placing their hopes on the Governor. They are urging us to call Gov. Snyder’s office and ask him to veto these lame-duck bills. I will join this effort, but I hold out little hope that this governor will be moved to reject the full array of bills being jammed through this legislature.
What is happening in Michigan, and in a host of other places around the country, is the result of a concerted effort by right-wing republicans to develop effective practices to undermine democracy. They are finding ways to curtail people center policies that challenge corporate interests. The actions by the Republican dominated legislature are not the result of panic at having lost the three major elected offices of the state to Democrats. Rather, these are actions that have been evolving over the years to blunt the will of people to curtail the power of money and corporate interests.
Republican ideologues and the corporate interests that back them have long understood that democracy is not their friend. The passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 aimed to eliminate legal barriers such as literacy tests and poll taxes at the state and local levels. These practices were aimed specifically at preventing African Americans from voting. The new Voting Rights Act ensured federal oversight in places where less than 50% of the non-white population was registered. Since the passage of this Act, right-wing interests and white supremacists have been seeking other means to exert their control. They have consistently undermined the Act itself, resisted its reauthorization, and under Trump, are actively moving away from any federal challenges to state voting practices.
Meanwhile, State governments, like Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, have been pushing to find new ways to undermine democracy. These efforts have been developed and refined by right-wing think tanks and politicians for decades. Tactics such as moving polling places, gerrymandering districts, restricting numbers of polling stations in urban areas, denying student voting, demanding picture IDs, and steamrolling legislation to undermine citizen initiatives are all thriving, often literally under the cover of night. Certainly, without much public notice or oversight.
At the center of the lame-duck efforts in Michigan, there are two consistent strategies emerging. First, there is the effort to limit the power of public referenda, either by first passing and then gutting popular initiatives such as raising the minimum wage and providing sick leave for people. This tactic is combined with efforts to eliminate the capacity of local governments to pass legislation.
The Michigan legislature is after every local expression of protection of the environment from stripping local officials to overseeing tree planting to monitoring septic tanks. The legislature fears the changes that people are willing to make when they directly meet together in face-to-face, person-to-person, efforts to create new ways of living.
As we resist these right-wing moves by the lame ducks, we need to think about the larger implications for public decision-making. Representative democracy is now more than 200 years old. In these last 40 years, we have seen a persistent erosion of the centuries-long effort to expand the notion of who is a citizen, how they are represented, and how such representatives are held accountable. From the Supreme Court deciding elections against the popular vote to the decision eight years in, Citizens United the country is experiencing “a wave of campaign spending that by any reasonable standard is extraordinarily corrupt.”
Direct democracy, where people engage with each other to determine what matters, needs to be fostered at every level. By strengthening our most immediate and direct relationships we can begin to create new political practices that will point us toward a new democratic future.