The Ultimate Slate Pitch?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, March 24, 2023

 

Ready for a good laugh? Good. Here’s Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, writing in Slate. The piece is called “The Republican Plan to Make Voting Irrelevant,” and it begins like this:

 

On Tuesday, it was reported by NBC News that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continues to recover at a rehabilitation center after his fall at a restaurant in Washington earlier this month. McConnell spoke with fellow Republican Senators over the phone from the facility and “sounded like Mitch,” according to Senate Minority Whip John Thune.

 

The news brought to mind McConnell’s exceptional instincts as a political calculator, and in particular his past cynical and perhaps prescient deliberations concerning his own health. In 2020, amid reports that McConnell had visited Johns Hopkins in Baltimore after concerning photos were published showing intense bruising on one of his hands, the Kentucky Republican began a campaign to pressure the GOP-controlled Kentucky Legislature to change that state’s law to remove from the governor—who is a Democrat—the authority to select a candidate to fill the unexpired term of a departing U.S. senator. The ability of the governor to appoint a nominee to fill the unexpired term of a senator without restrictions is the law in 35 states.

 

So, a veto-proof supermajority within the elected Kentucky legislature passed a law that requires the state’s governor to choose an interim senator from the same party as the guy who was elected last time around, and this is an “attack on our democracy” that “makes voting irrelevant”? Apparently so:

 

This effort—to remove powers from elected representatives who are Democrats—has become the new method of disenfranchising voters and maintaining perpetual Republican political power. And it is being undertaken with alarming frequency and speed across the country. This may be the most dangerous and efficient structural attack on our democracy. Its threat, and pernicious ingenuity, lies in its ability to make voting itself irrelevant

 

This is profoundly ridiculous. Again: with an apparently straight face, Ifill is arguing that it is more democratic to empower just one of Kentucky’s elected officials to choose a temporary federal senator than it is for a supermajority within the elected state legislature to require that that temporary senator be from the same party as the guy who was initially elected by the people. Ifill even goes so far as to call this process — a process by which one set of elected officials has told another elected official that he must respect the results of the most recent Senate election — “disenfranchising voters.”

 

(You will be shocked to learn that Ifill makes no mention of the fact that the change Kentucky has made is already the law in a handful of other states, including in Hawaii and Maryland, where it presumably serves to “maintain perpetual Democratic political power.”)

 

The rest is equally silly. Among the other things that Ifill complains about are the removal, by the elected governor, of an unelected prosecutor in Florida who refused to follow the laws that were passed by the elected state legislature; the removal, by the elected state legislature, of a Missouri attorney who, by Ifill’s own admission, “admitted to making errors in her investigation and was admonished by the bar”; and the decision of the elected U.S. Senate to exercise its constitutional powers to decide who sits on the Supreme Court.

 

Hilariously, Ifill concludes her piece with a call to action that contradicts her initial point. “This should be powerful motivation for congressional Democrats—and, indeed, for all Americans who wish to live in a democracy—to turn out and vote this year and next,” she writes, “to save the framework of democracy while there’s still time.” Turn out and vote? Surely, by Ifill’s own standards, that power should be invested without exception in whichever governors happened to win last time around?