Opinion | The Republican Party Has Embraced Its Worst Self

If Republicans in Washington were enthusiastic about Citizens United, they were silent in 2013 after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, where that same Republican-appointed majority gutted a critical section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for new restrictions on voting. Neither McConnell nor House Speaker John Boehner had any comment in the wake of the decision, despite the fact that they voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act seven years earlier, under President George W. Bush. Boehner had even called it “an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy.” In 2015, he would effectively kill a House bill to restore the Voting Rights Act to its former strength.

Since Shelby, Republican lawmakers in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia have openly suppressed the vote with voter purges, strict ID laws and cuts to voting infrastructure (closing polling places in predominantly Democratic areas like college campuses, for example). While this happened, their counterparts in Washington either looked the other way or actively denounced efforts to protect the vote. The recent Democratic House bill to combat corruption and strengthen voting rights was, McConnell wrote in The Washington Post, “a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party.”

Let’s return to those rival accounts of United States history. If the story of the American republic is the story of democratic decline as much as it is democratic expansion — if backlash shapes our history as much as progress does — then the current moment is easy to understand. We are living through a period of democratic erosion, in which social and political reaction limits the reach and scope of past democratic victories. In this way of looking at the present, we’re living through a period of institutional deterioration, during which American government ceases to function in the face of polarization, zero-sum conflict and constitutional hardball.

The Republican Party has been the single most important force behind that erosion, breaking norms, backing suppression and welcoming an endless flood of money into our politics, all to protect themselves and their ideology from the will of the people. Viewed in that light, the acquittal of President Trump — the desperate cover-up in the face of damning evidence — is just another brick on a road Republicans have been paving for years.

It is what you would expect them to do, not because of any fear of the president or personal fealty to him, but because the party sees accountability, whether to voters or to the Constitution itself, as a threat to its interests. If the acquittal of Trump shows us anything, it’s a Republican Party free of pretense or artifice, ready to embrace its worst self without shame or embarrassment.