The GOP's New Civil War Against America Isn’t With Bullets

Why 51 Texas lawmakers fled the State to stop a power grab, and what it means for us all…

The Republican motto — since Nixon sabotaged LBJ‘s Vietnam peace negotiations and Reagan blew up Carter’s deal to get the Iranian hostages back — has been: “If you can’t win, cheat.”

As Republicans rush to redistrict/gerrymander Texas, if enough Dems leave town there won’t be a quorum so the redistricting can’t happen. Which is why Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was threatening to could lock up Democratic lawmakers to prevent them from leaving the state.

Governor Abbott thought he had a pretty slick plan; have Texas: Republicans refuse to consider legislation funding aid to the people stricken by the recent disastrous, climate-change-fueled floods until after the state had been more severely gerrymandered. Because of massive FEMA cuts, those people are pretty desperate.

Calling his bluff yesterday, Democrats fled the state to Illinois, where Governor JB Pritzker offered sanctuary to the 51 Texas legislators in need of it. Texas Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said:

“Governor Abbott has turned the victims of a historic tragedy into political hostages in his submission to Donald Trump. He is using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans, all to execute a corrupt political deal. Apathy is complicity, and we will not be complicit in the silencing of hard-working communities who have spent decades fighting for the power that Trump wants to steal.”

But that’s just the smallest tip of the iceberg of election rigging that Trumpy Republicans are pushing all across the country. Sadly, because Democrats are not making a big deal nor being theatrical about it, the media is paying almost no attention to the number one way Republicans are rigging the next two elections.

If the Republican Party insists on invoking Abraham Lincoln’s name, they might want to pause and read something the man actually said. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet,” Lincoln famously declared a principle he fought an actual civil war to uphold. But today, the party that claims him as its founder is waging a different kind of war; not against slavery, but against democracy itself.

This time, their biggest weapon isn’t the bullet or even gerrymandering: it’s the purge.

From Georgia to New Jersey, from Congress to the courts, the GOP is in the middle of an all-out assault on the very foundation of American self-governance: the vote. And unlike Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election in full public view, this campaign is quieter, more technical, and far even more destructive.