BuzzFlash: “Making Good Trouble Since May of 2000”

May 30, 2021

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH Short Take

To begin to understand how Republicans representing a minority of the US population, primarily white, could sink a commission to investigate the attempted coup on January 6, it is informative to begin with context and an important statistic that Vox noted in the wake of the Democrats winning the two Georgia Democratic seats in January:

Well, it’s official. Georgia Democratic Senators-elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are going to Washington. The Senate will be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that, with Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote, Democrats will have the narrowest possible majority in the Senate.

If the Senate were anything approaching a democratic institution, however, the Democratic Party would have a commanding majority in Congress’s upper house. The Senate is malapportioned to give small states …exactly as many senators as large states….

Because smaller states tend to be whiter and more conservative than larger states, this malapportionment gives Republicans an enormous advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.

That disparity goes a long way in explaining how just 35 GOP Senators could sink consideration of a bill to impanel a commission to investigate the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol and attempted coup. The two-senator per state no matter the size is a relic of the compromises made in the Constitution to appease the slave states. The two Republican senators from Wyoming, Barrasso and Lummis, from a state with the smallest population in the United States — 576,000 — voted no on Friday to a commission. Their two votes had the same value as those of California’s two senators — Feinstein and Padilla — who represent nearly 40 million people and voted to find out who was responsible for the insurrection on January 6. (The full roll call is here.)

The commission vote provided robust evidence of the farce of a filibuster. Several Senators of both parties didn’t even vote, as the Associated Press reported:

The Senate vote was 54-35 — six short of the 60 needed — to take up a House-passed bill that would have formed an independent 10-member commission evenly split between the two parties. It came a day after emotional appeals for the commission from police who fought the mob, the family of an officer who died and lawmakers in both parties who fled Capitol chambers in the worst attack on the building in two centuries.

The Republicans were mostly but not totally united: Six voted with Democrats to move forward. Eleven senators — nine Republicans and two Democrats — missed the vote, an unusually high number of absentees for one of the highest-profile votes of the year.

So theoretically, the Republicans could filibuster voting reform with just one Senator voting no present? That is worse than anyone imagined. At least make them all show up once before blowing up the filibuster.

According to an analysis of the 2020 census, our nation of 331 million people is aging and less white. So, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Mitch McConnell pulled out all the stops to prevent an inquiry that might reveal that the white minority supports sedition if it leads to a continued white male government, and therefore what happened on January 6 is not treason in their eyes but justifiable efforts to maintain the status quo.

Furthermore, the May 28 vote underscores that Biden and the Democrats can’t be bipartisan when they are dealt a deck of cards in which Republican representation is inflated by a Constitution written to ensure the slave states would stay in the nascent union.

There’s nothing bipartisan about a Senate that relies on slave-era allocation of power. The Democrats have far too long been played for suckers in this theft of representation of the majority. Covering up a coup is a high-risk and desperate attempt to prevent majority rule.

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