Jim Brewster was cutting up with his colleagues on the floor of the Pennsylvania state Senate, waiting to be sworn in for his fourth term in office, when all hell broke loose. Brewster won his November election by 69 votes and survived multiple legal challenges from his opponent, Republican Nicole Ziccarelli, who sought to have hundreds of mail-in ballots thrown out because voters hadn’t properly dated them. The state Supreme Court ruled against her in November, and on Dec. 16, the Pennsylvania Department of State certified Brewster’s victory. The drama, it seemed, was over.
But as Democrats lined up for swearing-in ceremonies, the mood suddenly changed inside the chamber, and it didn’t take long for Brewster to figure out why: The Republican state Senate majority was about to launch a last-ditch attempt to overturn his victory by refusing to seat him in the Senate.
It didn’t matter that the legal challenge had failed. Pennsylvania Republicans, who spent more than $1 million on futile efforts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in November’s presidential election, were willing to ignore the court if it meant they might be able to gain one more seat they didn’t need to hold a majority in the state Senate.
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” Brewster said last week. “They were trying to steal the election.”
Brewster was finally sworn in on Jan. 13, after a federal court ruled in his favor, too. But many Republicans in Pennsylvania have not accepted defeat. Instead, they have indicated that their plan for the 2021 legislative session is to try to rig the state’s democratic system so they will be less likely to taste defeat again.
Similar crusades are underway all over the nation, in Texas, Arizona, Georgia and other states. Radicalized by four years of Trump’s presidency, angry over his loss, and emboldened by their own success in fending off Democratic dreams of flipping even a single state legislative chamber last fall, the GOP is ready to subvert democracy in state capitals nationwide. If Pennsylvania is any indication, Republicans could use their majorities to take a jackhammer to voting rights while curtailing the power of Democratic governors and legislators. They may even attempt to overhaul courts in a way that bends the justice system to their liking.
Pennsylvania Republicans are “flexing their muscles, their authority and their power to try to limit the ability of Democrats to participate in our democracy,” said state Sen. Jay Costa, the Democratic minority leader. “They believe that their power should be supreme, in the sense that it should supersede the powers anybody else has. They don’t want to have to be held by the checks and balances that we have the ability to provide.”
The Republicans who hold total control of 29 state legislatures are making clear that the authoritarian tendencies of the 45th president were a symptom of something deeper within the GOP.
“Donald Trump has left office, but Trumpism continues to be empowered in state capitols across the country ― not just among protesters, but among the lawmakers in power,” said Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator who now serves as the executive director of Future Now, a progressive group that focuses on state legislatures. “That has the risk of metastasizing, and it’s certain to keep fueling the movement.”
Attacking The Right To Vote
Conservatives have long used state legislatures to launder increasingly radical, often anti-democratic policies and positions into the Republican mainstream.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Arizona Republicans passed an anti-immigration bill that served as a model for other conservative legislatures. Five states passed copycat versions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which imposed draconian ID requirements on immigrants and mandated racial profiling of anyone who might look “illegal,” after its original approval in 2010. The Supreme Court eventually struck down most of the law, but it helped turn hard-line anti-immigration rhetoric into a GOP litmus test well before Trump descended a golden escalator and launched his presidential campaign with a fascistic diatribe against immigrants.
Voting rights fared even worse. In 2011, Wisconsin’s Republican Legislature approved voter identification legislation that helped launch a nationwide assault on voting rights. Between 2010 and 2019, 25 states ― the vast majority with Republican-controlled legislatures, and many eager to move after a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 ― passed bills that placed new restrictions on voting.
Pennsylvania passed its own voter ID law in 2012, and although most GOP lawmakers stayed on message about the purported threat of “voter fraud,” the Keystone State’s top Republican at the time gave away the game: The legislation, then-state House Majority Leader Mike Turzai said, was “gonna allow” GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
That plan didn’t quite materialize. Legal challenges stopped the law, which was among the most restrictive in the country at the time, from going into effect in 2012, when Obama won Pennsylvania and his second term as president. The Supreme Court eventually struck it down as well.
But it’s not hard to draw a straight line between the Republican lawmakers who cut their teeth in state legislatures during the Obama years ― a period the GOP spent openly challenging the legitimacy of the nation’s first Black president and passing laws meant to blunt his party’s political power ― and the conspiracy theories surrounding Democratic victory in the 2020 election.
Roughly half of the 147 congressional Republicans who voted to overturn last year’s election results are former state legislators, including Rep. Andy Biggs, the Arizona congressman who led the fight to overturn Biden’s win in his state, and Pennsylvania Reps. Fred Keller, Scott Perry, Lloyd Smucker and Guy Reschenthaler. All the Pennsylvanians except Reschenthaler, who didn’t enter the state legislature until 2015, voted in favor of the 2012 voter ID bill. Perry, in particular, played a key role in Trump’s effort to invalidate the election results, The New York Times revealed last week, by introducing the president to a U.S. Department of Justice official who was willing to do anything he could to change the results in Pennsylvania and other states.
In states like Pennsylvania, the combination of heavily gerrymandered legislative districts and closed primaries has insulated many Republican lawmakers from threats to their incumbency, and today’s political and media environment further incentivizes ambitious elected officials to prioritize the most rabid elements of the conservative base to boost their profile at home and nationwide. So the most extreme elements of the current crop of state legislators may be even more radical than their predecessors.
Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who questioned November’s election results, was one of at least 21 state and local GOP lawmakers who were present at the Jan. 6 rally that turned into a riot in the U.S. Capitol. Mastriano was not among those who entered the Capitol, but his campaign helped organize bus trips to the “Stop the Steal” rally.
And despite Republican efforts to deflect blame for the riot, Mastriano stoked conspiracy theories and spread misinformation as part of an anti-democratic power trip fueled by the idea that any GOP election loss must have been fraudulent. He staged a hearing in the state Senate to question the election results in November, and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani showed up to testify.
Back in state capitals like Harrisburg, those conspiracy theories are now driving efforts to erode voting rights and curtail access to the ballot.
“This climate has reenergized the push to roll back progress on voting,” said Hannah Fried, the national campaign director at All Voting Is Local, a voting rights campaign of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The stuff that people are saying about vote-by-mail ― that it can’t be trusted, that there’s fraud ― that is patently false and has been demonstrated time and time again to be untrue. And yet they persist.”
So far this year, Pennsylvania lawmakers have introduced 14 pieces of legislation meant to limit voting rights, more than in any other state, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Immediately after Trump lost, two GOP legislators announced that they would file legislation to eliminate provisions approved in 2019 that allowed no-excuse absentee voting for the first time. Pennsylvania Republicans also introduced legislation to tighten signature-matching requirements on absentee ballots, increase poll watcher access to absentee ballot-counting sites, eliminate permanent early voting lists, and specifically mandate the rejection of absentee ballots that are not received by Election Day.
The state House has already scheduled at least 14 committee hearings to discuss changes to the state election system, and is scrutinizing everything from voting machines to the process for accepting mail-in ballots. In the state Senate, GOP leadership has proposed the creation of a “special commission on election integrity and reform,” a bipartisan group tasked with reviewing “the security of the vote before, during and after Election Day” and examining the role of the judiciary and statewide officials in the election process.
Republican leaders in Pennsylvania argue that they don’t want to relitigate the election, and that their eventual decision to seat Brewster proved that they weren’t trying to “steal” his race, despite his claims. “If anything,” Republican Senate President Pro Tem Jake Corman told HuffPost, it was Democrats who violated state law and attempted a “coup” in Brewster’s race, because Democratic members of the state Supreme Court ruled that minor problems ― like failing to date absentee ballots ― were not a sufficient reason to toss out the votes.
And it was Democrats like Gov. Tom Wolf and Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Corman said, who created the atmosphere for conspiracies to flourish, by stretching election laws beyond the legislature’s intent and refusing to accede to GOP demands to increase the number of poll watchers allowed at election sites and implement other so-called “election integrity” measures.
“There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Pennsylvanians, who do not believe the last election came off in a way that provides integrity to the election process,” Corman told HuffPost. “That is a major problem for democracy in our commonwealth, that people don’t have belief in the electoral system. Our job is to go back and review how the election process went, to dispel false rumors and false stories that are there and look to see where changes can be made to add integrity to the process so that people have confidence moving forward. This can’t be done by Republicans, it can’t be done by Democrats, it has to be done bipartisan.”
Of course, there’s a reason for that purported lack of belief in the voting system: Republicans stoked wild voter fraud theories for months before the election, and have not stopped since.
Costa, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said his caucus believes there need to be tweaks to the election process, but that there are already mechanisms in place to do that. The new commission, he said, is designed only “to continue this drip, drip, drip about fraud and everything else.”
