Trump & Ohio Republicans: Partners in Crime

By Matt McGuire

July 25, 2022

Like many Americans, I have been watching the January 6th Committee hearings.  What I have seen has been absolutely terrifying, and not at all unexpected.  Although the committee has brought forth new information in each hearing so far, the general outline of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election has long been known to those following the story.  Trump and his henchmen publicly stated much of their rationale for ignoring the will of citizens and abusing the Constitution before, during, and after the insurrection, and continue to do so to this day.  

One of the most terrifying things that has come out of all this is how willing the Republicans have been to embrace both Trump’s lies, and his methods.  The belief that the will of citizens, expressed through the democratic process, is somehow invalid if it does not benefit Republicans has become party orthodoxy.  If this belief is accepted by GOP voters and leaders, and it has been; the events of January 6th should be seen not as anomalous, but as inevitable.

We have seen proof of this all over the country since the insurrection.  Republican-controlled state legislatures have enacted laws limiting voting rights and granting themselves the ability to overturn elections to national office.  In several Red states the legislatures have directly overturned ballot initiatives approved by citizens if those initiatives are not to their liking.  We saw this in Florida even before 2020 when the legislature neutered an attempt by citizens to return voting rights to convicted felons who had served their sentences.  We have seen it in several states where citizen-passed Medicaid expansion has been shot down by the state GOP.

The most obvious and dangerous example though has been the slow-rolling coup against democracy itself committed by Republicans on the Ohio redistricting commission.

Ohio citizens have passed two ballot initiatives to reform the process of drawing congressional and state legislative districts in the years since 2015.  Both of these initiatives passed with overwhelming majorities of Ohio’s voters.  The majority GOP on the commission simply ignored both of them.  Multiple times the Ohio Supreme Court, which has ultimate jurisdiction in these matters, ruled the GOP-drawn district maps unconstitutional.  The GOP commission simply ignored these rulings, and the court chose not to use its only tool, contempt citations, to force compliance with our state constitution.  

Now Ohioans will vote in November in districts that are unconstitutional.  The difference between Trump’s coup attempt and this by the Ohio GOP is one of degrees, not of substance.  The fact that the Ohio GOP did not need to resort to violent insurrection does not render their actions here any more legitimate.  Just as a successful coup by Trump and his henchmen would have given us an illegal and illegitimate federal government; the actions of the Ohio Redistricting Commission will leave us with an illegal and illegitimate state government.

The GOP is OK with this.

The conservative political commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote something back in 2017 that applies here.  He wrote “if conservatives become convinced they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy”.  This is exactly what we see in statehouses everywhere across our nation, and its underlying rationale is no different than that of the January 6th insurrection.  These seemingly unconnected actions are part of a greater authoritarian whole.  The laws of our nation, and the will of its citizens, mean little to the Republicans when power can be grabbed.

What we have seen in the past few years is that this authoritarian impulse has stretched our institutions past their breaking point.  The Ohio Supreme Court proved unable to prevent this legislative coup, and the US Supreme Court seems to be at times on the side of the authoritarians.  The powers of the federal government to combat these power grabs are ironically limited by the very Constitutional protections they seek to overturn.  If this March toward GOP fascist rule is to be stopped, it will be done by us, the citizens of, at least for now, a free democratic nation.  We cannot all be Officer Goodman, who led the mob away from the Senate meeting room on 1/06, but we must all choose to do what we can to maintain our free democratic nation.  

The hearings of the January 6th Committee, and the actions of the Ohio GOP, show in stark relief what will happen if we do not.