The one big reason why most Republicans are acting irrationally — without consequences

If you consume mainstream news, you might think the Republicans are in trouble ahead of next year’s congressional elections. In a recent report by CNN, for instance, Republican Congressman Mike Flood of Nebraska is met with a barrage of boos and jeers at a town hall.

They should be in trouble. Though the president’s policy agenda is dramatically unpopular, Flood and the Republicans have gone along with him. Donald Trump’s net approval is now -15 percent, according to the latest numbers by The Economist, with 55 percent disapproving. Gallup’s are worse. His rating among independent voters is 29 percent.

You’d think a congressman like Mike Flood, who represents a district that’s evenly split, would at the very least pretend to be contrite, knowing that being on the good side of voters is the key to remaining in office. You’d think he would behave like he knows he’s in trouble.

But he’s not. In that CNN report, Flood gives the impression that the opinions of his constituents, whose outrage is abundantly clear, are immaterial to his goal of staying in power – which is to say, he’s behaving as if he has no fear of democracy holding him accountable.

In that, he’s following the president’s lead. In a recent CNBC interview, as Joe Walsh put it, Trump said that “won the 2020 election (he didn’t). He has a 71 percent approval rating (he doesn’t). The jobs numbers were rigged (they weren’t). I could say something funny here, but I won’t. It’s just so damn dangerous to have him in the White House.”

In the same interview, Trump said he would “probably not” run for office again, understanding full well that the Constitution limits presidents to two terms, whether or not those terms are consecutive.

Walsh is often right, but here he’s doubly so. It’s so damn dangerous when a president and his party act like democracy doesn’t matter.

In 2009, after they passed into law the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama and the Democrats faced the prospect of a wipeout in the following year’s midterms. The law started out unpopular and grew more unpopular by the day. But they didn’t try to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices, even though the consequences were catastrophic. The Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Obama’s presidency never recovered.

Donald Trump and the Republicans, however, are trying to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices. I don’t think there’s any one source of disapproval, like the ACA used to be for the Democrats. Instead, public ire seems to have multiple layers, with the deepest being the gigantic sales tax, in the form of tariffs, that the president has unilaterally imposed on everyone. And Trump knows it. That’s why, in anticipation of a wipeout, he asked legislators in Texas to redraw its congressional districts to give his party five more seats.

This should be damning. And the Republicans should be running from the idea, in the same way that some Democrats ran from Obamacare. But most are doubling down. Texas is going to try gerrymandering its districts to give Trump the advantage, as likely will any state controlled by the GOP that has at least one big blue city in it. (Perhaps this is why Mike Flood can shout down constituents with impunity. Nebraska Republicans could choose to redraw his district to ensure reelection.)

But the Republicans are doing more than changing the rules of democracy. They are creating the conditions for criminalizing it.

Democratic legislators in Texas left the state to deny a quorum for Republican efforts to redraw its congressional districts. The state’s attorney general declared the move illegal. The state’s governor ordered state law enforcement agencies to arrest and return them. Texas has no jurisdiction in Illinois, where some Texas Democrats decamped, but that didn’t stop vigilantes from issuing bomb threats.

This is in addition to the Justice Department opening an investigation into alleged tampering of the 2016 election by Barack Obama and his administration. (The allegations are completely imaginary.) There is, moreover, the fact that two Democrats have been arrested and are pending trial; two Democrats were manhandled and arrested; one Democrat was assassinated; not to mention the president ordering the (short-lived) military occupation of the city of Los Angeles. More recently, three House Democrats were “in essence, incarcerated,” after a masked ICE agent locked them in a room at a detention center.

The goal is silencing dissent, and elected Democrats are not the only targets. All of us are. Even as Trump and the GOP do things that make people angry – like taking away their food money, taking away their vaccines, taking away their jobs, all while forcing them to pay more and more for the essentials of life – people can’t vent their anger.

The heart of democracy is our ability to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But the Republicans are creating conditions nationally, after having done so locally, in which that’s not possible.

They are either gerrymandering voters out of existence, their judges are narrowing the right to vote to the point of extinction, or they are preparing to prosecute people for their opinions. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before being a liberal is a criminal offense.

The only Republicans acting rationally are those who represent districts in blue states. “What Texas is doing is wrong and I’m opposed to it,” New York Congressman Mike Lawler told Politico, adding that “he’s sponsoring a bill with fellow blue state Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California that would ban gerrymandering nationwide.”

But they are only acting rationally, because their party cannot change the rules of democracy to avoid being held accountable by their constituents for their choices. Blue states like New York and California are now considering redrawing their congressional maps in reaction to potential moves by Texas, Florida and others to do the same. In other words, blue-state Republicans have an immediate incentive to behave themselves while the rest of the GOP, including its leader, does not.

That fact alone should be damning.

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