Playing by the rules

The biggest difference between the Republican Party and the Democrats isn’t that one party is full of bigoted, hateful, grifting, rapist fascists and the other party is the Democrats. It’s that the Republicans, especially in the days of Trump, don’t give two shits about law or democracy or guardrails or doing anything other than destroying the United States and hurting as many people as they can, while the Democrats keep acting like those aforementioned laws and democracy and guardrails still have any effect.

I’m not naive. I know there isn’t a lot of procedural things a minority party can do in the halls of Congress. I know it’s hard to mount a legal defense if, say, the Supreme Court strikes down a voter-approved redistricting map in Virginia, all while it gives the thumbs up for the rest of the old Confederacy to lynch the Voting Rights Act and force gerrymandered maps down citizens’ throats.

The Trump regime believes it can do whatever the hell it wants, and the Roberts court and Congress are A-OK with his lawlessness and grift. Democrats should stop pretending the law actually matters. Why not keep the voter-approved map in Virginia? Sure, Trump and the GOP will cry foul. They’ll probably go to extreme lengths to stop anyone elected under that map from being seated. What would matter is that we would see Democratic leaders acknowledging that the game has changed. That the rules have been tossed out the window.

We have millions of regular citizens who are fed up with the fall into fascism, who actively work to protect their neighbors. Who turn out en masse to protest. Who’ve been beaten and gunned down in the streets by federal agents. Those people deserve to have leaders who will fight with them, tooth and nail. Not just throw up their hands and say, “We’re not in power, so what do you want us to do?”

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