Republicans are inventing their own laws to subvert democracy

The people are speaking out. In state after state, Republicans are brazenly ignoring them.

Welcome to a Monday night edition of Progress Report.

Want to see one of the worst headlines that I’ve encountered in years? Of course you do! Here it is, courtesy of CBS News:

Big Labor bosses? Who wrote this, the Chamber of Commerce? The National Right to Work Foundation? Charles Koch himself?

There is a story to be told about how in some unions (mostly ones dominated by white men, which is a minority of them), the rank and file lean more conservative than leadership (though I have been speaking to a lot of Teamsters who are very annoyed at Sean O’Brien lately). But this language and framing is something you’d expect out of the National Review in 1994, not a network news outlet in 2024. Just more proof that the national political media simply defaults to conservative frames, especially when in search of conflict.

Tonight, we’re talking about fights, playing out in increasingly rigged state courts, that could determine the November election and the fate of democracy going forward. No pressure.

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When Democrats say that this year’s election is a battle for the future of democracy, they are in some ways not being alarmist enough.

Over the past eight months, Republicans and their conservative allies in many states have used every tool at their disposal to wage war on voter registration and popular initiatives. As deadlines to finalize ballots draw near, many of these fights are either just settled or still ongoing, sowing late summer chaos, heartbreak, and outrage.

Conservative secretaries of state have emerged as some of the biggest villains of the election cycle by manipulating arcane laws and inventing new interpretations of long-standing rules in attempts to shape the ballot to their liking.

Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston has been particularly active in throttling democracy, most recently with some help from friends in even higher places.

Late last week, the Arkansas state Supreme Court affirmed Thurston’s nakedly ideological decision to throw out an abortion rights amendment that should have qualified for the ballot. Activists collected more than 100,000 of signed petitions, far more than were required to qualify. But according to Thurston, the activists had not correctly filled out all the paperwork documenting the training given to their signature gatherers, which he decided would justify tossing 14,000 signed petitions and prevent the amendment from qualifying.

Earlier this year, Thurston’s inane and disingenuous nitpicking delayed and ultimately killed a ballot initiative that would have applied standards to charter and private schools that receive vouchers as well as guaranteed early childhood education across Arkansas.

So who is this guy? It’s a question that a lot of Republicans were asking themselves a decade and a half ago when Thurston showed up out of nowhere to run for Arkansas land commissioner, a statewide position charged with collecting late taxes and auctioning the land of people who fail to pay. Just 28-years-old at the time, Thurston had spent the previous six years working in maintenance at his local evangelical church in Little Rock.

Before that, Thurston earned a Diploma of Biblical Studies after completing a one-year program at Agape College, a non-accredited religious college connected to the church. He’s now running to be Arkansas state Treasurer, and has raised most of his money from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’, her father Mike Huckabee, the Chamber of Commerce, and a conservative Arkansas PAC called Legends for Economic Growth.

In Ohio, voting rights activists have appealed to the state Supreme Court in a last-ditch attempt to strike the abhorrently misleading language that Secretary of State Frank LaRose and other Republicans attached to their anti-gerrymandering amendment.

The description is soaked in lies, starting with the assertion that the 15-person citizen redistricting commission would be “required to gerrymander” when drawing new legislative and Congressional maps. That flat-out lie was attached at the suggestion of state Sen. Theresa Gavarone, who argued that mandating maps that seek to keep communities together and reflect a close statewide partisan divide could technically be considered a gerrymander under the definition provided by the Oxford English Dictionary.

It’s unlikely that she actually bothered to look up the word, because the Oxford English Dictionary says that gerrymander means “to manipulate in order to gain an unfair advantage.”

LaRose also inserted claims that the amendment would prohibit citizens from being able to “freely express their public opinions,” which is also the opposite of the amendment’s intent.

The Ohio Supreme Court is dominated by conservatives, but it has in recent years forced rewrites of other misleading amendment descriptions, including the attempt to raise the threshold for constitutional amendments in the summer of 2023. LaRose wrote that description back when he still believed that he had a whiff of a chance at winning the Republican Senate primary.

His right turn has continued despite his humiliating loss; LaRose is also the party responsible for purging nearly 160,000 registered voters in late July, a disproportionate number of whom were people of color. Already, very active voters are discovering that they were purged for no obvious reason.

Alarmed by recent rule changes seemingly designed to boost Republicans’ chances of winning in November, Democrats took multiple legal actions against Georgia’s hyper-partisan Board of Elections. The first came from state Rep. Nabilah Islam Parkes, who filed an ethics complaint against the three right-wing members of the board over several decisions that will allow allow county election officials to delay certification of November’s results.

The complaint asks Gov. Brian Kemp to appoint an administrative judge to investigate the three Republican board members, who were publicly praised by Donald Trump just weeks before they invited local officials to interfere with elections on the GOP’s behalf. Since 2020, when it became an epicenter of conspiracy theories an election denialism, at least 19 county officials in Georgia have refused to certify elections.

The other action was a lawsuit filed by the Georgia Democratic Party that seeks to overturn the board’s delayed certification rules. The Democratic National Committee is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, which could get a boost from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s comments blasting the rules earlier this month.

"Activists seeking to impose last-minute changes in election procedures outside of the legislative process undermine voter confidence and burden election workers,” he said in a news release issued before the board voted to approve the changes.

The conservative state Supreme Court in North Carolina has refused to fast-track a GOP attempt to reinstate its ill-gotten majority on the state Board of Elections.

Gov. Roy Cooper filed a lawsuit this past winter to block a new GOP law that stripped him of the power to name the members of a number of state boards and commissions. A three-judge panel sided with him and blocked the law in March, and Republican legislators asked the state Supreme Court to take their appeal instead of waiting for a Court of Appeals to hear the case. That request was rejected, meaning that Democrats will retain a majority on the state Board of Elections through at least the November elections.

It may not be a long-term win for Democrats, however, as the court rejected Cooper’s request that state Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr. recuse himself from the case, in which his father, the state Senate Majority Leader, serves as a litigant.

Arizona, the third swing Sunbelt state, is seeing even more chaos unfolding over election procedures and ballot initiatives. Late last week, the state Supreme Court rejected lawsuits from both Democrats and Republicans and gave the constitutional green light to a constitutional amendment that would create an open primary election system.

The court did leave one hurdle remaining in a separate ruling, though, as it ordered a lower court to examine GOP claims that 40,000 petition signatures in support of the amendments were actually duplicates. Should that be the case, it’s possible that Prop 140 wouldn’t appear on the November ballot, though the deadline for changes will have passed by the time the trial resumes in September.

Arizona Republicans, leaning on the conservative state Supreme Court to deliver them every advantage possible, also filed a lawsuit on Saturday seeking to block executive orders issued by Gov. Katie Hobbs meant to promote ballot accessibility. Hobbs’ order commands state buildings to serve as ballot collection sites, which the state GOP equated to some kind of fundamental assault on liberty.

“We will not stand by as our constitutional rights are trampled,” Arizona GOP chair Gina Swoboda said in a very measured statement.

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