The word of course being midterms, shorthand for the 2026 Congressional elections. We see and hear references to the midterms fairly frequently:
- This could have consequences for the midterms
- Heading in to the midterms (which is bizarre as we are mere months away from the most recent round)
- Just wait until the midterms!
Various observers express puzzlement over the Republicans’ ongoing destruction of the American government, aligned with if not in outright service to Putin, Orban, Erdogan etc. Surely they will face backlash in 2026. That they are not considering this is inconceivable. Right?
Sure, under normal circumstances. Except of course we left normal circumstances behind no later than January 20. We are indeed headed towards the Cliffs of Insanity* and shrieking eels are the least of our worries, especially since we know the Dread Justice Roberts is out there somewhere.
Republicans are doing their best to move us toward managed democracy. There will be elections but the outcomes will be more or less predetermined, and the franchise will be restricted to the Right Sort of People to the extent of Samuel Alito's tolerance for judicial hackery, so yeah, pretty restricted. (It is merely a matter of time until the Fourteenth Amendment is ruled unconstitutional.) Enough states are on board with this to ensure the "correct" outcome on a national level.
For an analogy we don't even have to travel to any icky foreign places where they talk funny and have universal healthcare. We can go back in time right here to the Jim Crow South, where to be fair they still talk funny and it can get icky in the summertime. The good times there certainly remain unforgotten and since SCOTUS has mostly nullified the Voting Rights Act, most of the heavy lifting is complete.
So what we have is the Republicans taking their cue from the top and going all in on legal lawlessness. After all, as the new national motto puts it, QUID FACIS DE EO.
This may be far-fetched but it’s not, shall we say… inconceivable.
*Wallace Shawn’s line read of that is one of my absolute favorite things in that wonderful film.
1 comment:
One of the reasons that I've been pushing so hard/out in the streets so much is that I have little faith in future elections. Whatever one things of FOTUS, it's clear that some of those who are pushing authoritarianism were paying attention. Their attempts to throw out an election that they lost were thwarted (such a great word) by a number of factors. Local Republican election officials, statewide Republicans that honored their oaths, courts that required evidence for allegations of voter fraud, a disconnected-but-not-openly-supportive press, and a DOJ that flatly refused to stoke false fraud narratives ("just say it's fraudulent, we'll do the rest"). They have taken steps to make sure that all of these guardrails will not be a problem the next time.
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