Nukes, war weariness limit Ukraine options; consumers become soldiers

 

Gordon L. Weil

Ukraine is different. It won’t be run over. 

And it presents a national security challenge to the U.S. and Europe that is downright frustrating.

Most Americans are sympathetic to Ukraine whose main offense seems to be that it exists.  Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks the people there don’t know who they are. They are really Russian, he says, and if they won’t accept that, he’ll make them.

Americans lean toward the idea that the people should decide for themselves whether they’re Russian.  And many Americans would like to help give them the chance to make their own choice.

The U.S. is accustomed to being a great world power, able to have its views accepted after a little muscle flexing.  Now, it finds its options are limited.

There are two reasons for this problem.  Americans are tired of wars to help others which end up being costly in the lives of U.S. service personnel and military spending.  And they turn out to be indecisive. Plus, direct involvement in Ukraine could bring confrontation with Putin, a man who seems to have left rationality behind.

Putin has made a thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons if he faces outside opposition. The nuclear threat is itself a weapon that influences actions by other countries.  Beyond that, his own manic behavior is a similar weapon.  Who knows what will make him go off?

It’s tempting to compare Putin to Hitler.  They both liked to gobble up neighboring countries.    But Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons. Given Putin’s poorly performing armed forces, they are the Russian’s principal asset.

Putin mistakenly thinks he leads of one of the world’s great powers. He brushes aside the overwhelming condemnation of his Ukraine invasion by the U.N. General Assembly’s emergency session.  He may see great power precedents.

Twice the U.S. similarly snubbed the U.N.  In 1983, after U.S. forces invaded Granada, a Caribbean country where there were 600 American medical students, the same kind of U.N. session gave the U.S. the same treatment.  Then, after its 1989 invasion of Panama to topple its drug-dealing dictator, the U.S. again faced General Assembly censure.

In both cases, the U.S. installed governments more favorable to American interests. In Panama, U.S. forces captured its president and brought him to Miami.  After a trial, he was sent to prison. Is that what Putin would like to do with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president?

The domestic constraint on direct American or NATO involvement may have deep roots. In the fury of the moment, leaders may commit the country to a massive show of force to resolve a crisis only to find that what started out as righteous indignation turns into a costly quagmire.

Take the Golf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress, adopted in August 1965.  Two U.S. destroyers were thought to have been harassed by North Vietnamese (corrected) gunboats.  Congress quickly authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to take action.  He interpreted the Resolution as a declaration of war, and the conflict lasted 10 more years, deeply dividing the country.

More recently, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq involved specific causes that led to prolonged wars.  The U.S. reasonably went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but stayed in the hopeless effort to create democracy there, an effort that turned out to be America’s longest war.

In 1991, with access to oil at stake, the U.S. efficiently pushed Iraq out of Kuwait.  But war hawks wanted more, so in 2003 American forces took on Iraq’s Sadam Hussein, based on the phony claim that he had weapons of mass destruction. 

All of these conflicts have worn down American willingness to police peace. Institutions like the U.N. and NATO were created to provide a unified international barrier to Hitler-style invasions.  The EU was supposed to yield a unified European partner in the effort, but nationalism flourishes from London to Warsaw.

Putin has revealed the failure of post-World War II peace plans.  But he is not alone.  China swept up Tibet.  The U.S. propped up South Vietnamese dictators.   The world community does nothing to halt a range of Middle East conflicts from Syria to Yemen.

It’s possible that Putin has done more ultimately to reduce future armed conflict than all the post-war initiatives. NATO has come together.  Europe is acting with some degree of unity.  Russia is highly likely to become China’s satellite after much of the world slashes economic links with it.

But, as in any other war, helping Ukraine comes at a price.  It won’t be paid on the battlefield.  The cost is already coming at the gas pump and the shopping website.  The American consumer is today’s soldier.

To deny Russia or, for that matter, China the power to dominate world affairs, people will have to pay more to support them less.

Putin gambles, everybody loses

Gordon L. Weil

Is Ukraine run by Nazis?

Is Ukraine really part of Russia?

Is Russia back as a great power?

Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to force his unique and distorted views on the world.  Given his lies that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine, his claims require close review.  Here’s some context.

Putin charges that Ukraine is run by Nazis. In most Nazi-occupied countries during World War II, some people sided with the Nazis.  That was true from Norway to Poland, including Ukraine, which provided soldiers to fight beside the German army and a compliant government. Maybe that’s the background for Putin’s assertion.

But Putin fails to mention that the Soviet Union, run by Russia and sorely missed by him, had a formal treaty with Hitler that allowed the two countries to carve up Poland.  Russia’s dictatorship today is closer to old-fashioned Nazism than to Ukraine’s democracy.

Then, there’s the Holocaust, the Nazi genocide of six million Jews including Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky’s great grandfather and two great uncles.  Zelensky is a Jew. And Putin wants us to believe he’s a Nazi.

Russia deserves a “sphere of influence,” according to Putin.  Despite the Soviet Union having lost control of countries it occupied and oppressed, it should be allowed to dominate them as a way of protecting Russia.

There are at least two problems with his thinking. First, nobody is threatening Russia.  Second, the notion of geographic spheres of influence has faded over the past seven decades.

What Putin may really mean is that, without dominating countries surrounding Russia, his country is no longer the great world power it became after the Second World War.  Its population is less than half than that of the U.S. and Russia’s economy is smaller than California’s. The only vestige of its superpower status is its stockpile of nuclear weapons.

NATO thought Putin got it.  Russia could prosper by acting within international norms.  Disputes would not be settled by force. Putin would not stage a Nazi-style invasion of a neighboring country.  In an earlier column, I accepted that view and suggested that he was only bluffing.

The alliance’s error in dealing with Putin was its failure to punish Russia for seizing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.  This apparent appeasement probably led him to believe he could take over the entire country without much opposition. Zelensky and NATO have corrected that false impression and given him a nasty surprise.

Russia deserves to control Ukraine, he claims. It is really a part of Russia. They speak almost the same language. Tell that to many Canadians, who make sure they are not mistaken for Americans. Political boundaries have long sliced across common cultures.  People have the right to decide their nationality for themselves.

When the United Nations was established in 1945, the Soviet Union wanted more votes.  So Ukraine (along with Belarus) became a founding member with its own seat at the table.  With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it remained a U.N. member.  Russia had already made it look like a real country.

In the years after World War II, the Cold War pitted NATO, formed to prevent Soviet advances westward in Europe, against the Soviet Union.  In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and some optimistically thought the world had arrived at permanent peace.  Nine years later, Putin was in power and he was not ready for peace.

Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, Putin has gambled and his country will suffer.  NATO and the EU have learned that it is dangerous to allow their economies to become overly entangled with Russia’s.  They will likely avoid the risk of remaining dependent on an undependable partner.

While the economic break will cost the U.S. and its allies, it could set the Russian economy back decades.  Without its links with the massive American and European market and investment, it could be forced to depend on China.  To a certain degree, the once great power could itself come within the Chinese sphere of influence.

The Ukraine crisis has prompted worries that Russian success could encourage China to attack Taiwan.  While Taiwan was a part of China, it has evolved into a separation nation.  It is an island located in vital international waterways. 

The American involvement with Taiwan is like its 1991 intervention in Kuwait.  There it had a direct, oil-related interest and sent U.S. armed forces to push out Iraqi invaders.  Now, the U.S. Navy is deployed in the South China Sea.

Facing Nazi Germany, some American Nazi sympathizers formed America First.  Today, Donald Trump and his most ardent right-wing followers adopt the America First name and have expressed support for Putin.

The dangers of appeasing China, with its superpower ambitions, and the overt support by some Americans for foreign despots should be warnings. Been there. Done that.

  

Personal rights vs. public health: individualism reborn as common good fades

 

Gordon L. Weil

Something big just happened in Canada.

It was far more than truckers protesting a vaccination mandate.  It was a message about a fundamental change that seems to be spreading worldwide.

Shakespeare wrote, “There is a tide in the affairs of men.”  What happened in Canada was a sign of the tide turning.

Canada differs from the U.S.  Americans give the highest priority to individual rights.  Canada and some European democracies focus on the common good.

As a result of the global Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War of the 1940s, many democracies moved toward a greater emphasis on the common good.  In the U.S., Social Security and the huge war effort moved the country in that direction.

Later, Medicare and Food Stamps would be adopted. Britain’s National Health Service and Canadian national health care were both signs of this change of emphasis. 

After World War II, North American and European economies grew.  As personal wealth grew, citizens more willingly accepted increased government action to care for less fortunate people.

Even on the diplomatic level, the focus on common interests expanded.  The United Nations, NATO and the European Union reflected a willingness to contribute some national political independent action for what was seen as a higher common purpose.

The change was broad and widely accepted, leading to an unspoken belief that the tide had turned.  Society’s values may have changed for good after the Depression.  The political question became not whether to undertake action for the common good, but how far to go. 

The world seemed to be moving in the direction Canada had chosen rather than toward American individualism.  But resistance would grow.

The U.S. began to reverse the tide under the presidential administration of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.  Mental health care was cut and homelessness grew. Americans were increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their individual progress for collective effort.

The tidal change in attitudes about an enlarged government role, mistakenly called socialism by its critics, finally fully hit under the presidency of Donald Trump. His greatest political skill was in exploiting the growing discontent.  But similar leaders were emerging in places as different as the U.K., Hungary and Poland.

The new wave has been called “populism.”  Many people have become restive with government setting standards, redistributing income and placing limits on their conduct. 

The essence of individual rights is that each person should live as free of governmental restraint as possible.  This freedom should be limited only by the condition that a person’s exercise of their rights should not limit another’s rights, not by a notion of the common good.

Here is the problem with fighting Covid-19.  An article in the latest issue of Scientific American magazine concludes that the virus has hit harder in the U.S. than in other countries because of our putting individualism above the community interest. 

Most people don’t like being forced to wear a mask or have a shot. Protecting themselves at the price of some loss of personal choice should be left to them.  What about the possible effect of their choice on other people, even if it involved their contracting the illness?

Political opposition to Covid-19 protective measures was misplaced when the risks of the virus were high.  Concern about the physical threat may have justifiably pushed aside concern about the sense of isolation and the disruption of public education that resulted.  But that is changing as people seek to regain greater control over their lives.

Progress in dealing with the virus has led to more attention being paid to its social and personal effects.  Government has begun recognizing these costs, while public health officials pursue their necessarily more narrow approach.  Mandates are being relaxed and more responsibility is being left to individuals.

Unfortunately, reasonable consideration of Covid-19 is difficult when it has become highly politicized. The difficult search for a balanced handling of the physical and mental health threats has been packaged as simply a matter of rights and has been taken over by partisan politics.

The struggle for balance has turned into a near war over individual rights versus the common good.  In the U.S., political opposition to even limited protective measures replaces leadership with pandering.  This problem is not limited to the U.S.

The latest sign of the turn of the tide – the trucker’s uprising in Canada – is caused by a belief that individual rights should not only be protected, but that they are absolute.  Any hope of balance disappears when truckers harass you for simply wearing a mask.

The assertion of absolute rights that allow no protection for the rights of others undermines the ability of government to function on any issue.  In the U.S., it contributes to a political divide that seems to be beyond closing.

 

George Washington favored big government, debt reduction

Gordon L. Weil

The president agreed to meet the demands of a ruthless foreign leader rather than to fight back against his aggression.

That’s not “breaking news.”   But it is true.  A U.S. president paid yearly to a despot to reduce attacks on Americans rather than launching a counterattack, because he believed it was the better option.

The president was George Washington.  The nation celebrates his birthday, a legal federal holiday. (“President’s Day” has no official standing.)  As I do every year, I recall aspects of the historic contribution to the country he led.

Three Barbary States in North Africa were high-jacking American and other countries’ commercial vessels and seizing their crews.  The pirate states demanded ransom and annual payments to cease their aggression and return American sailors. Washington strongly opposed paying such tribute.

But Congress would fund only the most limited federal government. Washington favored a larger federal budget that would allow the country to have a navy.  Without one, the U.S. lacked the means to respond to the pirate nations. 

Faced with a choice between a lengthy legislative fight to build the U.S. Navy and abandoning captive Americans or paying ransom, Washington unhappily chose to bribe the enemy.

Much as today, the government was split between two new parties that refused to compromise.  The Federalists backed commerce and a larger government and the Republicans supported agriculture and limited government. Given his stature, Washington hoped to remain above this split but came under attack by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans.

Though his own views were more closely aligned with the Federalists, he tried to remain independent.  He favored policies that would produce results not political wins.  He risked his reputation and fortunately felt no need to posture to pursue any political ambition.  He was pragmatic, what some today call a “problem solver.” 

His method of governing is missing today.  Politics lack people who seek solutions whatever their parties may favor and are willing to risk political defeat for putting practical solutions above party loyalty.  Washington had the benefit of being a man without a party.

Washington invented term limits. Earlier, when as general he resigned his commission and relinquished power, King George III, his former foe, reportedly said that if Washington could do that, he was the greatest man in the world.  As president, he decided to serve only two terms.  His decision eventually became a constitutional amendment.

He risked being a “lame duck” in his second term, perhaps losing influence because he would soon be gone.  But he could show that he was more committed to doing his job as well as he could than to holding onto to his office and political control. 

Washington was a rare leader. No other elected federal official is subject to term limits. Most members of Congress make political survival their highest priority. Maine’s version of term limits is so weak it amounts to a revolving door.

Along with other historic figures, Washington has been criticized for owning slaves. Though slavery was common during his lifetime, he surely knew it was wrong.  Still, he believed he could not disrupt that “peculiar institution” without tearing the fragile new country apart.  For him, allowing slavery was a pragmatic choice, He knew it could not last.

Unlike others, he tried to keep his slave families intact. Long before any other prominent slave-owning leader acted, he provided that his widow should free his 120 slaves, which Martha Washington did soon after his death.  Slavery was not officially ended for another 65 years.

His life teaches lessons, still valuable today.  His experience with what amounted to an all-volunteer army during the Revolutionary War revealed to him that the U.S. could not become a major world power, able to develop its territory, without a strong, well-financed federal government.

By today’s standards, he would be the target of both parties.  He favored what was considered a large and powerful central government, financed by taxes from the commerce and agriculture it protected and promoted.  He aimed to pay down the national debt and not finance normal government operations by more borrowing.

Perhaps even more important and certainly missing in government today, he sought solutions that would work not merely serve political ends.  Public service was not meant to be a career, but rather to be a way of lending your skills to helping your community for a limited period.

A wit once wrote that politics is about two parties – the “Ins” who want to stay in and the “Outs” who want to get in.  That quip seems never to have been more true than it is now.  That was not Washington’s view of public service.

Regrettably, George Washington’s record as a political leader has faded.  His independent leadership produced results and set an example still worth following. 

World aligns into two blocs over Russia’s Ukraine threat

 

Gordon L. Weil

“War is peace.”

“Freedom is slavery.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

In 1949, George Orwell wrote a cautionary story of a huge nation with these declarations as its mottos.  The novel was called “1984” and it was a somber warning of a possible future world dominated only by ruthless superpowers.

Somewhat surprisingly, the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine has pushed the world closer to a version of Orwell’s view of the future – China-Russia versus America-Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to reassert his country’s influence over neighboring nations, replacing the domination by the Soviet Union before it disintegrated in 1991, leaving Russia as its principal survivor.  Ukraine, formerly a Soviet republic, worries him as it moves away from Russian influence.

Massed Russian forces on the Russia-Ukraine border back up Putin’s demand that NATO withdraw its forces from Eastern European countries formerly under Soviet domination and keep Ukraine from joining the alliance. In return, Russia might pull troops away from the border.

By using coercive diplomacy, Putin may have thought he could boost Russian security and regain influence over Eastern Europe.  His threat of war might bring a diplomatic result.  Clearly, this would be a variation on Orwell’s “War is peace.”

He might have assumed that NATO had accepted Russia’s 2014 takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region.  Though that aggression had spurred the NATO buildup he disliked, he may have thought the alliance was now ripe to be pushed back.

NATO was created in 1949 to counter any new Soviet expansion.  It had grown somewhat slack as Russian pressure faded, but it was refocused by the Crimea invasion.  The Russian military buildup on the Ukraine border brought it fully back to life.

In effect, Putin’s policy may have backfired.  With a relatively small economy and a population increasingly acquiring a middle class lifestyle, he might be limited in launching war.  Frustrated, he turned to China, led by Xi Jinping, who shares his authoritarian views and hostility to the U.S.

The Chinese population and economy are far larger than Russia’s.  Xi could now pick up the support of his weaker and embattled neighbor. They issued a joint statement, which has been dangerously ignored.  It is the China-Russia manifesto for undermining the U.S. as a world power.

Both leaders claim they support democracy, but they say each country can have its own definition of what it means.  For them, it means one-party rule. 

China’s holding Uighurs in what amount to prison camps, supposedly for their own good, is its version of “Freedom is slavery.”  But for Xi, despite saying he supports the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that’s acceptable.

Orwell defined “doublethink” as the ability to hold two opposing views and believe both of them.  The China-Russia manifesto is full of it.

Apparently Xi and Putin share the belief that the seizure of Crimea has nothing to do with NATO’s current response to the current Russian build-up.   They want to keep world opinion focused on the alliance’s protective moves, not Russia’s aggression.  That’s a new twist on “Ignorance is power.”

Meanwhile, they ignore opposition in the U.S. and most of the West to Russia’s Crimea invasion plus China’s ending of Hong Kong’s democracy and threatening to take over Taiwan.

If the China-Russia manifesto, proclaiming there are “no limits” on their cooperation, means anything, the world has moved closer to the Orwellian struggle between superpowers.  This new alliance directly challenges the western concept of democracy, which requires that every election is decided by the people not by the ruling party.

Orwell’s superpowers had no agendas beyond the Party holding onto power. Democracy is intentionally messy, allowing for disagreement and change.  Yet differences between the U.S. and some European countries in dealing with Russia could produce a better policy than the uniformity of a dictatorship.

Putin may have single-handedly and unintentionally reshaped world politics.  NATO, the alliance of democratic countries aligned against aggression, has been brought back to life.  Russia, receding in superpower status, may have chosen to attach itself to China’s rising star.

The China-Russia manifesto makes a direct appeal to the leading unaligned countries. Brazil, India and Saudi Arabia all have governments leaning toward authoritarian rule.  The manifesto proposes closer relationships with countries that assert their own definitions of democracy and human rights.

The conflict, despite Russia’s saber-rattling, will play out mainly in economic competition. Will national goals be better promoted by the free enterprise that is a feature of democracy or by state economies under authoritarian parties?

The U.S. has lost much of its leadership of the West and its influence on the world economy because of weakened confidence in the dollar and a reduced commitment to NATO.  The China-Russia manifesto is a warning that time is running short to repair the damage.

Demand for ‘most qualified’ judge means ‘no Black woman’

 

Gordon L. Weil

In the celebrated movie “Casablanca,” the police chief makes a show of exclaiming that he is “shocked” to find gambling at Rick’s bar.  He orders it closed just as an officer hurriedly hands him his winnings.

That looks pretty close to Republican criticism of President Joe Biden keeping his campaign promise to nominate an African American woman to the Supreme Court.

Some Republicans suggest his intent is shocking, overlooking anything shocking about their having blocked any consideration of one of President Obama’s nominees and zipping through the review of then-President Trump’s choice of Amy Coney Barrett.  Biden’s choice will likely be confirmed under the GOP’s own short-cut rules, so posturing is the best they can do.

They assert that Biden is playing politics with the appointment instead of picking the most  qualified person available, regardless of race or sex.  Some people are likely to swallow the line that past nominees were selected purely on merit, while Biden is playing politics.

Let’s face it. The selection of Supreme Court justices has always been political.  And throughout history, Obama aside, presidents proposed and the Senate confirmed nominations heavily favoring people like themselves – white men.  In short, sex and race have always been a factor.

Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, sees it differently.  “The irony is the Supreme Court, at the very same time, is hearing cases about this sort of affirmative racial discrimination and while adding someone who is the beneficiary of this sort of quota," he told an interviewer.  He assumed that any Black woman nominee would have enjoyed affirmative action.

Contrast that statement with the remarks of GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina.  “We’ve only had five women serve and two African American men.  So let’s make the court more like America.”  That’s affirmative action.  Graham has usually accepted the nominees of either party’s president. 

Sen. Susan Collins, Maine’s GOP senator, has said Biden’s promise to pick a Black woman, an appointment she could accept, is unusually “political.” She’s in her fifth term in the Senate and surely knows that judicial nominations are political.  In fact, she rejected Trump’s Barrett rush.  She has merely condemned Biden for being “clumsy.”   

All Supreme Court justices are lawyers.  For most of American history, the political system kept women and African Americans from becoming lawyers. The obvious result was a small pool of possible candidates to draw from, even if there were no discrimination in judicial picks.

Dean Erwin Griswold asked each female member of Harvard Law School first year classes why they were taking the place of a man.  The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of those women and, having become a lawyer, she could not get a job in a law firm.

An American Bar Association report reveals the relative standing of Blacks and women among lawyers and judges.  The numbers tell a story of racism and sexism.

Of all lawyers, 85 percent are white, while 5 percent are Black.  New lawyers are joining the profession in just about the same ratio.

Women are about 37 percent of all lawyers, while 63 percent are men. In law schools today, the division between men and women is about equal.  When Ginsburg was a law student in the 1950s, less than two percent of her classmates were women.

Appointments to the federal courts lag behind the ratio among all lawyers.  In the latest three years for which information is available, 76 percent of those named have been men and 24 percent have been women.  By race, 84 percent of the appointments have been white and 4 percent Black.   

Using the latest 30-year rate of female judicial appointments, it would take about 40 more years until the number of women and men named to federal courts were equal.  Nominations of Black judges are more difficult to forecast because of their limited numbers.

The ABA data also suggest that increases in the number of federal judicial appointments of both women and Blacks have occurred under Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and the rate has slowed under Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump.  That puts Biden’s move in historical perspective.  Elections have consequences.

Wicker forecast: “This new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote.”  Every senator should consider the merits of any nominee. But Wicker was saying that a still unnamed Black woman, whatever her record, could fail to get the support of a single GOP senator.  That’s the reverse of affirmative action.

Would such a denial of even minimal bipartisanship simply be caused by automatic Republican opposition to any Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president? 

Or would GOP opposition amount to placing a seal of approval on a federal court system that could for many more decades feel the slowly dying grasp of the past?

Government by the people reversed by Senate refusal to act

Gordon L. Weil

In the U.S., somebody always wants to block somebody else from voting.

From the outset, people with property didn’t want average people to vote.  Whites didn’t want blacks to vote and men didn’t want women to vote.

The country is a great democratic experiment, but let’s not get carried away.  Anybody in political control was unlikely to allow others in on it.

But pressure for popular control could not be denied. African Americans got the right to vote, at first only in theory.  The popular vote replaced state legislatures in electing senators. Women gained the right to vote.  Eventually, the country moved toward a political process open to all. It took almost two centuries.

But popular democracy has begun to unravel.   Ironically, the largest turnout in history for a presidential election has unleashed the strongest efforts to turn back the rapid progress made since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From 1933 through 1994, Democrats controlled Congress for all but two years.   To end that control, the Republicans had to take the South away from their rivals and to make it more difficult for Democrats, especially African Americans, to vote.

Opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act led many southerners to jump to the GOP.  It expanded historic Democratic efforts to limit access to voting.

While the GOP’s strategy worked, it was thwarted in 2020 by two factors – Covid-19 and Donald Trump.  The virus threatened to keep voters away from the polls, calling for finding ways to help people vote.  Trump’s possible reelection stimulated unusually strong support and even stronger opposition.

Responding to Covid-19, many states expanded mail-in voting, and developed other measures including public drop boxes and more convenient times for voting including at places remote from Election Day polling locations.

Easier access attracted more voters. Nationally, people of each party and other electoral subsets turned out in greater numbers.  While improved access did not favor Democrats, it might have been a factor for them in swing states. 

Since 2020, states under GOP control have cut back on the use of methods easing access.  Early voting dates and polling places have been reduced.  New forms of voter ID are required in some states. Texas even claimed it ran out of voter registration forms due to paper shortages. 

The 2022 congressional elections will take place in newly designed House districts.  GOP-controlled states continue to pack Democratic voters into as few districts as possible.  The Democrats have done the same in a few places, but they have fewer opportunities because they control fewer states.

House elections this year are expected to produce GOP control, caused mainly by voter suppression and the new round of redistricting.  The Supreme Court won’t touch politically driven district design. It’s even tough to get it to look at race effects.

Congressional Democrats have thus far failed to enact federal legislation overriding voter suppression.  Added to reduced voter access, in the wake of the 2020 election some Republican states have moved to control how votes are counted.  

Trump attributed his election loss to corrupt vote counting resulting partly from the use of mail-in ballots.   He complained that mail-in ballots led to vote tampering, because early counts in his favor gave way to wins by Joe Biden after the envelopes were opened.  Repeated reviews, including by Republican officials, found no evidence that Trump’s claims were true.

When he and his backers failed with those claims, they attacked the vote counters.  In Georgia, for example, Brad Raffensperger, the GOP Secretary of State, refused Trump’s request to reverse Biden’s victory.  The GOP-controlled legislature eliminated his election authority in favor of its own designees.  Similar moves occurred in at least seven other states.

The Constitution gives states power over the “times, places and manner of holding elections,” but Congress may override them.  Partisan control of elections could end up giving one party a way to decide on winners, no matter the popular vote.  Democratic efforts in Congress to require multi-party control of the process have failed, thanks to the filibuster and solid GOP opposition.

The January 6, 2021 insurrection tried to force Congress to ignore the official results of presidential elections in some states.  Congress might now amend existing law to ensure that vote counting is purely procedural, just as it has always been.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins is a leader in that effort, which would do nothing more than preserve the historical process.  She has not supported any voter protection.  Independent Sen. Angus King expresses alarm at efforts to reduce popular control.

Faced with stepped-up GOP voter suppression, Democrats need to mount massive get-out-the-vote operations and to launch legal challenges to partisan control of the election process.  The political wars this year could grow even more bitter and hard fought.