WHAT’S UP WITH REPUBLICAN LEGISLATORS THESE DAYS?

By Ruth A. Sheets

Nearly every couple of days in the past few months, maybe way longer, news comes of another law being passed in a red state legislature and quickly signed by its governor that can and should be described as mean, even cruel.  I can’t help but wonder what is going on that red legislatures have become instruments of social warfare wielded by state governors with the state’s citizens the targets.

A lot of that social warfare has been going on in Florida where Gov. Ron DeSantis just has to nudge the state conservative legislators and it will be law, whatever DeSantis wants for his own personal vengeance, fear and hatred of the other, and some as yet, unidentified reasons.     These are not laws that are needed, as DeSantis claims.  They are laws of personal and political grievance.  The mostly white men among Florida’s conservative legislators don’t seem to have a problem with advancing the DeSantis fearmongering and hatred.

One would expect in a vulnerable state like Florida, the legislature’s attention would be on planning to cope with global warming, improving health care for the people of Florida, considering needed modifications to farming and fruit industries, preparing for the huge seaweed mat heading toward the coast, countering flooding challenges, or ending Florida’s food insecurity, the real problems facing the people of Florida.  Why would any legislature neglect the real problems to serve their governor’s whims?  That’s the question! 

I have been pondering for several years, since Trump was “elected” president, that any semblance of concern for the American people on the part of the Republican party seems to have drifted into oblivion.  It appears cleaving oneself to Donald Trump as leader requires sacrificing one’s moral compass, caring little or nothing for the people one is supposed to be serving, and finding ways to use cruelty to achieve questionable goals, goals which are rarely if ever stated, but must be present since so many Republicans have latched onto them.

The current targets of Republican legislatures, women of child-bearing age, the LGBTQ community and transgender youth in particular, Black citizens, asylum-seekers, public schools, and minority voters do not deserve this Republican vitriol.  I do wonder how Republican legislators get away with it and keep getting elected.  Here are a few potentials I am currently contemplating.

1. Voting suppression has been underway in the former Confederacy and Confederate wannabee states for a long time.  There is still a lot of resentment concerning the 1865 loss.  There is some kind of romance tied to the “Southern cause” that feeds a whole lot of ugly attitudes and behaviors.  Gotta still blame certain groups for the loss.

2. The current business world is obsessed with fascism, controlling other people,  making employees accept whatever pay bosses say is what workers deserve, and the unwillingness to pay their fair share of taxes.  This led to huge wealth in the hands of a few and many of them finance conservative white Republican legislators at all levels, as long as they do what the rich white guys want.

3. Evidence has shown that children are vulnerable to  indoctrination.  Republicans see that as an avenue for gaining power when they know the things they stand for are unpopular.  Go after the schools, public schools, of course, and dictate what is taught there under pain of dismissal, even arrest.  Few real teachers want to teach only what Republicans want taught if they have a choice. 

4. Book banning is a selling point for Republicans because one does not even have to have read the books they want to ban.  It just has to have a suggestive title, cover art, or author of color.  

5. Conservatives are obsessed with sex in all its forms.  Can’t teach sex and no discussions of menstruation for girls, I guess because ignorance for girls is bliss.  Getting teens pregnant works well for Republicans too.  Hey, in 13 years or so, those forced birth children can fill the factories of the legislators’ donors.

6. Evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity in the United States has taken a turn toward support of fascism (which they call religion), claiming god tells them that people who don’t look like them, experience the world like them, and believe what they do are to be suppressed.  There is a history for them to follow.  1920s and 1930s Italy and Germany come quickly to mind.

7. Perhaps, when a political party chooses to follow a leader who has no moral compass, its leaders will see as acceptable, even valuable;  grabbing women’s bodies without consent; openly voicing racism and misogyny and expecting people to see it as normal; being uninformed and lying as often as possible, even tens of thousands of times, knowing they will rarely be challenged on the lies; inciting, supporting, or participating in an insurrection and 28 months later still not charged for it; stealing secret documents if you can get away with it, lying about having them, then claiming to have the right to them, expecting no charges.   It seems political bad behavior is the way to go to get power and attention and to avoid accountability, and Republicans are practicing every day. 

8. Red states have been heavily gerrymandered and the Supreme Court has said “OK, as long as it is political.”  (Gerrymandering is always political SC conservatives!)  So, the state legislatures have Republican supermajorities because the state’s people have been groomed to vote only “R” despite the fact those super majorities have done little to nothing to help them and have no intention of changing.

9. Hurting people works for a lot of folks as long as the targets are not themselves and their friends and families.  Since many white people in the red states have only white straight friends (or it seems that way), passing “bathroom” bills that force people to use the bathrooms of their birth gender, keeping trans girls from playing girls’ sports, denying care for transgender kids and youth, making drag shows illegal, keeping trans adults from getting care, taking over cities whose populations are mostly Black, make sense to them.  What happens when those targeted groups find ways to make the pain less, figure out how to get around Republican bullying?  Will Republican legislators move to inflict greater pain?  Will they trump up more crimes they can charge members of those “hated” groups with?  Richard Nixon and his team did it through their “war on drugs” aimed  at “Hippies and Black Americans” (part of his “Southern strategy”).

10. Hate, fear, anger, and resentment are powerful emotions that get adrenalin going.  Maybe people who have schooled themselves to feel very little can get high on those negative emotions.  To be truly effective, they need to be directed toward someone the person can convince himself/herself deserves their hatred.  Following up the hit of adrenalin, they can move to passing bills that will in some way hurt that target.  I suspect a broad smile lights up their faces as they enter their votes to inflict what the Republican legislators see as righteous pain.

11. Republican legislators, at least some of them know what they are doing is wrong, or at least they have a tiny twinge in the back of their mind that it is unamerican, unconstitutional, but they do it anyway.  When one of their target groups dares to challenge them, they will make the person(s) pay.  We saw that in Tennessee when the Assembly voted to expel 2 Black representatives for standing with protesters at the Assembly’s inaction related to gun violence after 6 gun deaths at a school not far from the state Capitol.  The Black legislators were reinstated by their cities.  Then, Montana did the same when the transgender representative dared to tell them their bad actions would cause harm to trans youth among whom there is already a high suicide rate.  She was silenced and is now suing because the action of the legislature is unconstitutional, first amendment, that free speech thing.

12. Our Federal government Republicans are also behaving badly, holding our economy hostage so they can seriously cut programs that serve disadvantaged people:  elderly, poor, disabled, American veterans.  That is shameful, but they are on a roll and will do as much damage as they can before the people stop them.  I just hope it isn’t so much damage that it cannot be repaired.   

This legislative violence started out with the goal of doing harm to the groups they planned to target.  Some groups were added later, like trans kids, but the writing, as they say was on the wall.  Each law has ancestors which took away bits of citizens’ rights.  Legislatures required Black drug users greater sentences than white ones using the same drugs; they put all kinds of conditions on abortion, who could get one, how long they would have to wait, the kind of invasive procedures would have to be done to the woman first, what kind of facility could house abortion providers, parental consent, etc.  Despite the Constitution giving every citizen the right to vote at age 18 and up, states began chipping away at those voting rights:  need I.D.s the Republican legislators would approve, voting locations limited in districts that are heavily minority or Democratic, permitting only specific people to use mail-in or absentee ballots and somehow those privileged people would have to deliver the ballots themselves, gerrymandering became very precise, surgically cutting up districts to give Republicans advantages they did not deserve, you get the idea.  

These ancestor laws have morphed into what is going on in the red states.  Texas and a couple of other states are incentivizing citizens to rat on people they think are getting or helping someone to get abortions and some state legislatures want to execute women for having abortions (sound like Russia, China, North Korea)!  They are also threatening anyone who crosses state lines to get an abortion.  (can we say “obsessed?”)  For those same red states, being transgender is a crime and parents who help their desperate children get trans care are abusers, criminals.

Colleges and universities are not allowed to make their fragile white students uncomfortable learning about diversity because, let’s see, white people want to pretend they are the only people on Earth who matter?   Everyone else is a potential servant or slave? 

I think, as I have for a long time now that conservative white people are scared, scared all the time.  They know in their “heart of hearts” they are no better than anyone else, which is why they have to keep feeding themselves with the Fox Not Nearly News lies.  They need to hang together in legislatures and pass appalling laws that will hurt those people they know are just as good as they are.  They warp Christianity to fit their equally warped world view, essentially creating god in their own image. 

All this effort by bigots like DeSantis and the other conservative white legislators and governors have one slight upside.  Democrats and independents are starting to wake up to the fascist laws that are descending on us.  People are talking to each other trying to figure out how to do an intervention to treat Republican insanity. 

Republicans no longer can be considered a worthy political party.  They lost that position when they let their racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, pseudo-Christianity take over their thoughts and actions.  I can honestly say, “these are not good people, even if they themselves don’t realize it.”  I hope a lot more Americans will come to see that and vote them out of office.  We all must do whatever is necessary to get registered to vote and swear an oath to ourselves that we will vote in every election and vote for people who care about us and this nation.  That would be a start.  There are lots of people out here to help.  Call out Uncle John or Aunt Mary when they make racist, sexist or other unkind remarks and remind them that we’re all people of equal value, even them.  We can make things better.  In fact, we have to before global warming makes us all irrelevant.