The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

Doesn’t it seem like the United States is coming apart at the seams? Consider the following:

America is fundamentally a federation of 50 states and a variety of territories, “commonwealth” entitles, etc. It’s a giant sprawling nation whose founders correctly anticipated the sorts of centrifugal forces that we see right now.

The issue of states’ rights has been unleashed again. The current iteration of the existential states’ rights debates probably began when Barack Obama was elected President in 2008.

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, it certainly does not now look like America was ready for a black President 12 years ago, no matter how proud of themselves were the majority of its voters who elected him.

Well, maybe a majority of Americans were ready for a black President. But as we saw in the last two general elections, a very healthy minority of them were not.

Now, after four years of Donald Trump laying bare for all the world to see America’s enduring racial intolerance, it seems like the lid has been truly prized off this Pandora’s Box of dark, racist intolerance.

The Republican Party has become the magnet for what seems perilously close to an electoral majority of Americans who are not only still not ready for a black President but who are also unprepared to accept the inexorable reality that whites are becoming a statistical minority in the United States, and that enough women are willing to join the political fight that their voices can no longer be ignored.

So where do states’ rights come in? The notorious Georgia election law is a good example. Peach State Republicans and their mostly white, mostly male base of support did not like the outcome of the January US Senate run-off elections.

In those two contests, two incumbent white establishment senators – one a retired business tycoon and the other the wealthy wife of a financial insider – were upset by a young Jewish activist and an old-fashioned Bible-thumping black preacher.

It was a Hollywood script, and you can be certain you will see its reenactment on the big (or, more likely, small Amazon Prime or Netflix) screen soon.

Georgia Republicans, and their colleagues in many other states, were sufficiently dissatisfied with the election results that they tried to tip the balance in their favour by resorting to a time-tested device.

They decided to change the rules.

While the details of the new Georgia election law passed by the state legislature and proudly signed by Governor Brian Kemp are vitally important for voters in the state, the bigger point is that states’ rights are back in the centre of the national political debate.

States’ rights means that individual states have the ability to enact rules and legislation that suit them and a majority in their elected legislatures, sometimes at variance with the course of the central American federal government.

This was one of the fundamental tenets of the American constitution, which was a document forged by compulsory compromise. The framers of the constitution understood that the mix of disparate colonies in the centre of North America would never see economics nor politics in the same uniform way.

That’s why there are two senators from Wyoming and two from California, two from Rhode Island and two from Texas. Without such protections, why would South Carolina agree to join with New York and Massachusetts, which held significant advantages in colonial times and retain many of them today?

We all sort of understand this. What sets America apart from other sprawling global empires like Russia, China and Brazil is that the US from the start set out to manage itself as a democracy in which, at least theoretically, the ultimate power to determine its government and operating policies would be predictably and reliably determined by citizen voters in the course of regular elections.

Now the Georgia election law has threatened all that.

Maybe this law will produce an election next year that will restore to power a Republican senator from Georgia in 2023. Maybe black and other minority voters in the state will sigh resignedly and trudge on with their lives knowing that for a couple of years things were different but The Man will eventually prevail. Again.

Maybe not. Maybe the drama takes a different turn.

While Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats launch venomous grenades at the Georgia election law, politicians are unlikely to determine its fate. Even the justly famous Stacey Abrams, whose determined voter registration and voter turnout movement turned the January election in a stunning direction, probably cannot overturn the new law without help.

That help will have to come from the American federal judiciary.

But wait. Isn’t the American federal judiciary the same bunch of jurists that Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled US Senate just spent four years packing with more than 200 “conservative” judges. Yes, it is.

The Biden Justice Department is reportedly considering legal challenges to the Georgia law. Will they pursue that course, and if so, what will be the results?

There are no guarantees either way in such a situation. Sometimes appointed judges confound their political sponsors and issue surprising rulings. Landmark American civil rights cases in the 1950s, for instance, were decided in broadly liberal fashion by a Supreme Court led by a Republican appointee who was supposed to be a reliable conservative.

But a smart bettor might anticipate a less liberal interpretation by judges appointed by Republicans specifically to forestall any such outcome.

That leaves one remaining constitutional remedy.

While the American judiciary interprets the constitutionality of laws, the American legislature enacts those laws.

Biden’s Democrats control – barely – the American legislature now. Republicans are itching to recapture at least one house in that legislature next year. Will the Democratic-controlled Congress tackle legislation designed to overrule laws such as the Georgia Voter Law?

Would any Republicans be willing to join such an effort?

Current conventional wisdom suggests the odds are stacked against the overturn of the Georgia law. But you never know.

The city on the hill has lost its shine

While the essential democratic human right to vote is being debated and assaulted, the even more basic human democratic right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness seems to be threatened in the United States.

Each morning’s newspaper front page or broadcast imparts new accounts of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers, hateful incidents of anti-Asian bullying or sexual predation by respected public figures.

One pundit opined that the universe appears to be conspiring to compel some kind of resolution to the discordant forces unleashed by the undisciplined, demagogic, selfish presidency of Donald Trump.

But it is unfair and inaccurate to blame all this on Trump, convenient as that might be. And it’s not as though he tries to evade responsibility for it. On the contrary, though his maleficent voice is muffled these days, he nevertheless clearly takes pride in his continuing influence on daily American political and social life.

Racial intolerance, hateful acts and disgraceful, ignorant behaviour are hardly new in American life. Not so long ago in the still-short arc of American history, overt racial segregation was alive and well in many parts of the US, Asian-Americans were interred by a fearful government and women remained mostly economically disenfranchised.

Such is life, and certainly not only in America. Ignominious and reprehensible individual behaviour and inequitable government policies happen every day in every nation on earth.

But if you are going to proclaim that you are the “shining city on the hill,” as Ronald Reagan once proudly and famously did, and if you continue to maintain America is the template for good and democratic values in the world - as US politicians of both parties continue to regularly do - then you have to accept the sceptical scrutiny of the rest of the world when you behave as some Americans are now doing.

There is hope, arising from what might at first glance seem to be an improbable source.

Maybe, just maybe, Joe Biden is going to turn out to be the kind of transformative leader the US needs at this time of its extreme tribulation. Even if only he and his family have been paying attention for decades, he has long been preparing for becoming President. Let’s see how he does.