Thread by @MattGlassman312

I'm not a fan of what's going on in WI and MI; the crumbling of informal political norms of comity in favor of hardball power politics is not, on balance, a good development. And efforts to restrict voting are abhorent politics.

But there's also a lot of hyperbole here.

Legislatures finding ways to skirt popular referendum reforms by either keeping them off the ballot or cancelling them post-hoc? It happens *constantly.* The DC city council literally did this 6 weeks ago:

washingtonpost.com/local/dc-polit…

Legislatures reigning in executive power when it suits partisan policy or political needs? Please. It might be bad, but it sure as heck isn't new. Remember when Massachusettes stripped then-governor Romney of the power to fill vacant Senate seats?

nytimes.com/2004/06/25/us/…

Now, I want to separate out the voter suppression stuff. The actions that seek to restrict future voting access simply for the purpose of preserving power are abhorrent, and IMO seem to be indicative of recent GOP hardball acceleartion. It's unseemly and unbefitting our republic.

That said, it's not like they invented this yesterday. Anyone who grew up in a machine politics town like I did (Albany, NY) is well familiar with the endless fights about stuff like the location of polling places and the altering of the electoral calendars.

I just can't listen to "they're trying to separate electoral dates so no one shows up for election X and that proves they are neo-facists!" I mean, this is the oldest teacher's union trick in the books, getting the local school board election off the state/federal election day.

So I tend to distinguish between stuff that appears to be part of an increasingly aggressive GOP effort to suppress poor/minority voting (restricting voting days, toughening registration, closing poll sites), and stuff that is just classic state/local politics.

I'm also not super jazzed about arguments like "they gerrymandered the state and now they can make policy that is farther to the right and maintain their majority, even if less than half the voters pick them!"

That's true, and it's a weakness---or perhaps outright flaw---of the system if 45% of votes consistently nets 55% of the seats. But it doesn't come cheap. Note that if you move policy rightward to take advantage of this, you may *never* win the governor or other statewide votes.

Again, I don't want to give the impression that I see everything going on in WI and MI and NC as somehow business as usual. It doesn't seem *quite* like that to me. There's some hardball here for sure, and some of it is a new development, at least relative to a decade ago.

But a lot of these articles I read are trying to take stuff that is, if not routine, at least totally common all over the country over the past decades, and make it out to be part of a new right-wing fascist playbook. That's exaggeration, at best.

Seems to me there's been an increase in GOP hardball, especially around voter supression. That's very bad. But there's also a lot of feigned outrage over process, often by people upset about policy ends, that is trying to free-ride on these legitimately worrying developments.

And one upshot of this is that we tend to lose focus on what is most important. Racial Voter Suppression >>>Stripping Gov powers >>overriding referendum. By lumping them all together, it's easy to lose sight of the most important and aggregious hardball moves. (h/t @perrybaconjr)