Political forecasters called it that the state Republican convention would feature
turmoil ending in endorsements of the most extreme candidates, all to match the party’s current MAGA mood.
Among the jilted was the Republican front-runner for governor, former Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was left putting out an APB for the GOP.
“The party’s been taken hostage,”
he told The Spokesman-Review.
But there was another strain to the proceedings last weekend that didn’t get much attention. Political conventions are often colorful curiosities; this one took a darker turn.
The Republican base, it turns out, is now opposed to democracy. Their words, not mine, as you’ll soon see.
After the candidates left, the convention’s delegates got down to
crafting a party platform. Like at most GOP gatherings in the Donald Trump era, this one called for restrictions on voting. In Washington state, the delegates
called for the end of all mail-in voting. Instead, we would have a one-day-only, in-person election, with photo ID and paper ballots, with no use of tabulating machines or digital scanners to count the ballots. All ballots would be counted by hand, by Trappist monks.
OK, I made up the monk part. I did not make up the part about banning the use of machines to count votes. All in all it would make voting less convenient and harder, by rolling it back at least half a century.
But then the convention veered into more unexpected anti-democratic territory.
A
resolution called for ending the ability to vote for U.S. senators. Instead, senators would get appointed by state legislatures, as it generally worked 110 years ago prior to the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913.
“We are devolving into a democracy, because congressmen and senators are elected by the same pool,” was how one GOP delegate
put it to the convention. “We do not want to be a democracy.”
We don’t? There are debates about how complete of a democracy we wish to be; for example, the state Democratic Party platform has called for the direct election of the president (doing away with the Electoral College). But curtailing our own vote? The GOPers said they hoped states’ rights would be strengthened with such a move.
Then they kicked it up a notch. They
passed a resolution calling on people to please stop using the word “democracy.”
“We encourage Republicans to substitute the words ‘republic’ and ‘republicanism’ where previously they have used the word ‘democracy,’ ” the resolution says. “Every time the word ‘democracy’ is used favorably it serves to promote the principles of the Democratic Party, the principles of which we ardently oppose.”
The resolution sums up: “We … oppose legislation which makes our nation more democratic in nature.”
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