As America burns, a GOP war on voting | Will Bunch Newsletter

It was the great Kris Kristofferson, whom we just lost last fall, who wrote that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Is that what Trump meant by his “Liberation Day” of tariffs last week, which liberated America’s 401K investors of billions of dollars? At least millions of citizens felt the freedom to take to the streets over the weekend with their grievances, which should give all of us hope.

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In an America that feels on edge right now, few things in the nation’s capital are more precarious than the GOP’s fragile hold on power in the U.S. House. The Republicans’ current 220-213 majority is one of the smallest in modern times. And with crucial votes just ahead on issues like President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts that favor billionaires and corporations, every vote counts.

Well, unless you’re one of 800,000 Texans who live in Houston or its adjacent Harris County suburbs.

Voters who live in the Lone Star State’s 18th Congressional District, which is nearly 76% Black and Latino, have received a series of gut punches, beginning last year when longtime incumbent and civil rights icon Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died in office. The district then went strongly for another well-known local, Houston’s 70-year-old former mayor Sylvester Turner, giving him nearly 70% of the fall vote, even after his disclosure he was suffering from a rare form of bone cancer.

Sadly, Turner’s career as a U.S. congressman lasted less than 10 weeks. In late winter, the Houstonian fell ill and died on March 5. The intervening weeks — a momentous time back on Capitol Hill, including a budget vote carried by Republicans by a narrow margin — saw a large crowd come together for Turner’s funeral and candidates stepping forward to replace him.

What was missing for more than a month was any effort by Texas’ right-wing GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special election to fill the vacant seat. Last week, as residents in the 18th grumbled and at least one Democratic hopeful — along with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — threatened to sue, Abbott finally spoke...

...not to call the election, but to say he was holding things up because of his ongoing complaints about how one of the few Democratic counties in a mostly red state conducts its elections. It is true that Harris County voters have experienced problems like long lines — often because of a lack of polling places and other restrictions imposed by the GOP-led statehouse. Meanwhile, Abbott cynically worked with state lawmakers to enact legislation that ousted one Democratic elections chief.

But Turner’s untimely death has given Abbott a MAGA two-fer: a chance to keep a safe Democratic seat vacant for as long as he can get away with it, and to stroke the Big Lie that any election that Republicans lose must involve voter fraud.

“Harris County is a repeat failure as it concerns operating elections,” Abbott insisted in a local interview. “Had I called that very quickly, it could have led to a failure in that election, just like Harris County has failed in other elections. They need to have adequate time to operate a fair and accurate election, not a crazy election like what they’ve conducted in the past.”

Monday night, as the impasse started getting more attention, Abbott did decide to declare a special election — not in June, when a statewide runoff is already scheduled, but during the Nov. 4 general election. That means citizens in and around Houston will go eight full months without a representative on Capitol Hill. It’s outrageous.

Abbott’s filibuster of giving Harris County a free, fair and prompt congressional election may offer an answer to the hottest burning question as spring 2025 dawns across the nation: How on earth do Republicans, who seem to be fueling a voter rebellion with Trump’s insane tariff scheme, consumer prices that are rising despite a campaign promise to bring them down, and the president’s popularity plunging, expect to win the 2026 midterms, let alone keep the White House in 2028?

The governor of America’s second-largest state just said the quiet part out loud: voter suppression.

If you spend too much time on social media, as I do, you frequently see liberals commenting on the next elections, only to add, “assuming we have an election.” It feels like extreme internet paranoia and in one sense it arguably is, because it’s impossible to imagine there won’t be balloting in 19 months.

Or, at least, something that resembles an election.

Although there may be few opportunities to as aggressively put a thumb on the scale of election fairness as Abbott is currently getting away with, it’s also becoming clear that Republicans — who’ve embraced anti-democratic tactics from closing polling places on college campuses to advocating for strict voter ID laws — are taking their war on voting to the next level.

Look no farther than North Carolina, where the Democratic candidate for the state’s Supreme Court, incumbent Associate Justice Allison Riggs, should have been sworn in for a full term months ago, after the 2024 results showed she’d defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin by a scant 734 votes.

The moral of the story should have been that every vote counts, but instead it has been that Republicans can’t accept defeat in a democratic election. After losing a recount, Team Griffin went into state court asking that a whopping 60,000 ballots get tossed out because of a complicated technicality in the way these voters had initially registered, even though they had presented valid IDs to vote as required by law.

A federal court had ruled against this challenge before the election, and the proposed massive disenfranchisement was rightfully called “ridiculous” by Charlotte Observer columnist Paige Masten, who added: “But it seems to be the Republican playbook these days: If at first you don’t succeed, just try to throw the votes out.”

The challenge has dragged out deep into 2025, until last week when Republican judges on the intermediate Court of Appeals powered a 2-1 ruling that stunned the Tarheel State by siding with Griffin’s argument, although most of the potentially disenfranchised voters were given three weeks to prove their identity and make their votes count. Still, the ruling — which Riggs is appealing to a Supreme Court where her colleagues are mostly Republican — could cancel out enough Democratic votes to change the outcome. It’s a grim reminder of what was expected from Team Trump if he’d lost last November, and a warning of what’s ahead.

These miscarriages of democracy in Texas and North Carolina come at the same time that Trump has signed an executive order — arguably not worth the piece of paper he scribbled his name across — with the goal of suppressing future votes.

The sweeping diktat signed by the president late last month demands that would-be voters produce proof of citizenship, seeks greater cooperation between the federal government and states on finding and removing ineligible voters, and also to leverage federal dollars to prevent mail-in ballots received after Election Day from being counted. The order has been panned by legal scholars, who note that such rules are typically set at the state level, and is already the subject of a lawsuit by 19 states.

Still, Trump and the GOP have laid down a marker for the 2026 election, and beyond. The party’s recent actions make it clear that they will make it harder for regular folks to cast a ballot, by any means necessary, including a new wave of voter ID laws, constant legal challenges, and maybe cancelling elections where they can. And any efforts to fight back, by Democrats or other aggrieved citizens, will trigger more Big Lies about election fraud.

The hole in the Republican strategy is that as Trump continues to set America on fire with his unhinged presidency, even extreme suppression can’t stop a tsunami at the ballot box.

Question: Although not true, please address how the protestors were paid, how much and by whom. I know more than a few people believe this. Please dispel this nonsense. — August Mom ([email protected]) via Bluesky

Answer: I am SO GLAD you asked this question, since this entire conversation is also a pet peeve of mine. (So much so that I had my first-ever bad “political moment” at the local dog park, when a friend of a friend who is a Tesla owner insisted that the picketers outside Elon Musk’s showrooms have to be paid. I had to leave.) This is a beloved talking point on the far right — especially on Musk-owned X — which believes that MAGA is the real America and the only reason someone would stand out in the chilly spring drizzle is for a $50 payday. But can anyone seriously argue that some billionaire like George Soros sprung for a cool $250 million Saturday, the ballpark cost of buying the massive “Hands Off!” protest? The folks I met when I covered the Tesla protest in Devon, Pa., were a software engineer, a physicist, and a professor angry that their world of science and knowledge is under assault. The notion that Americans need to be paid to fight for their freedom makes me furious.

Given the diminished influence of the legacy media, it’s maybe not surprising that the abrupt MAGA-pressured cancellation of comedian Amber Ruffin by the White House Correspondents Association for its annual gala got surprisingly little coverage, and less than normal responses from newsletter readers. “That dinner should have died twenty years ago, back when George W Bush was president,” wrote Tom Desmond (from Plano, Texas!). “After he’d lied us into a war, I found the spectacle of the people who had largely failed to hold him accountable sharing a friendly evening with him to be highly inappropriate.” I agree, and also with Mark Ehlers, who wrote: “I think the WHCA should ban [press secretary] Karoline Leavitt from attending and invite someone from the Associated Press to give the keynote address. And put up a large map in the background showing the Gulf of Mexico.”

📮 This week’s question: In an upcoming column, I’m writing about the decline of book reading among young people. How many books do you read in a year, has it been more or less lately, and what would you recommend to entice young readers? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Book reading” in the subject line.

Last Saturday, hundreds of protesters, if not more, lined the street in an iconic setting: Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, where John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination triggered an age of unrest. The crowd came to voice loud opposition to President Donald Trump and it included Chelsea Day, who brought her baby daughter and told a local TV reporter: “It’s important for her to see democracy alive.”

But you know who didn’t see democracy alive last weekend? Readers of the city’s legacy newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, which gave no local coverage of the Dealey Plaza rally and only carried a short wire story about the national “Hands Off!” protest on Page 8 of the Sunday paper. When a reader in an online chat challenged the news organization over its lack of coverage, its managing editor, Amy Hollyfield, showed up with a startling response: the reason, she wrote, “is we didn’t realize the protest was going on. I regret that this is the answer because this is a big miss for us to be unaware of such a large event.”

But while the “big miss” by the Dallas Morning News was an extreme example, it did also capture a more systemic problem. By any measure, the stunningly large throngs of people who turned out Saturday at 1,400 sites from Florida to Alaska to protest Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce and key programs, and more, was a huge news story. With crowds nearing or passing the 100,000 mark in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston, the “Hands Off!” movement drew millions, maybe as many as 5.2 million, according to the 50501 Project. That’s up there with the biggest one-day protests in U.S. history, but you wouldn’t know that from the way it was played in the mainstream press.

“Print Media to Mass Protests: ‘Please Turn to Page 18,‘” was the perfect-pitch headline on Parker Malloy’s takedown of the tepid media coverage for the New Republic. It cited the shocking print play for the story in the New York Times — which only ran a picture on the front page, steering readers to that Page 18 article, even after a gaggle of marchers that stretched for 20 blocks down 5th Avenue — as well as the Washington Post (Page One teaser photo for a story back in the Metro section) and others. Malloy was joined by the nation’s most respected media critics like Margaret Sullivan in calling out their bizarre news judgment.

What went wrong here? As a 44-year veteran of newsrooms, I can tell you the answer is slightly more complicated than the vast conspiracy seen by some rank-and-file liberals. A lot of mainstream journalists have — wrongly, in my opinion —always viewed protesters as extremists who don’t represent the general public. But also — as dramatized in Dallas — the economic meltdown of the newspaper business model means many newsrooms have few if any working reporters on a Saturday. That said, the critics are right that the relentless downplaying of millions of Americans taking to the streets plays into legitimate fears that elite media outlets have been cowed into a submissive stance by an authoritarian POTUS.

There’s a theory among political scientists — generating a lot of online chatter — that massive nonviolent protest movements typically bring about radical change when they reach just 3.5% of the national population. For the United States, this would be roughly 11.5 million marchers, so — as a New Jersey man, Jon Bon Jovi, once said — oooh, we’re halfway there. If so, the Trump presidency might be livin’ on a prayer. Maybe someday you’ll read all about it.

I’ve always believed one reason America finds itself in its current mess is that there was no accountability for the substantial crimes committed by the previous Republican president, George W. Bush. On this date 13 years ago, I wrote about an underplayed report that even a top official in Bush’s State Department had found that torture tactics such as waterboarding alleged terrorists were most likely felony war crimes. I wrote: “The system doesn’t work anymore. And our so-called leaders don’t have the will to fix it. It’s up to the American people, and frankly I’m not sure if we can handle the job, either.” Read the rest and weep: “What kind of nutjob would accuse American leaders of war crimes?”

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