By Robert Reich
The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, declares it a “crisis … created by the presidential policies of this new administration.”
The Arizona congressman Andy
Biggs claims “we go through some periods where we have these surges, but right
now is probably the most dramatic that I’ve seen at the border in my lifetime.”
Donald
Trump demands the Biden administration “immediately complete the wall, which
can be done in a matter of weeks — they should never have stopped it. They are
causing death and human tragedy.”
“Our
country is being destroyed!” he adds.
In fact, there’s no surge of migrants at the
border.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 28 percent more migrants from January to February this year than in previous months. But this was largely seasonal.
Two years ago, apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period. Three
years ago, it was about 25 percent from February to March. Migrants start
coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer, then stop coming in
the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly.
To
be sure, there is a humanitarian crisis of children detained
in overcrowded border facilities. And an even worse humanitarian tragedy in the
violence and political oppression in Central America, worsened by U.S. policies
over the years, that’s driving migration in the first place.
But the “surge” has been fabricated by Republicans in order to stoke fear – and, not incidentally, to justify changes in laws they say are necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting.
Republicans continue to allege – without proof – that the 2020 election was rife with fraudulent ballots, many from undocumented immigrants.
Over the past six weeks
they’ve introduced 250 bills in 43 states designed to make it harder for people
to vote – especially the young, the poor, Black people, and Hispanic-Americans,
all of whom are likely to vote for Democrats – by eliminating mail-in ballots,
reducing times for voting, decreasing the number of drop-off boxes, demanding
proof of citizenship, even making it a crime to give water to people waiting in
line to vote.
EDITOR'S NOTE: In Rhode Island, state Trumplicans are trying to stop efforts to make easier voting measures adopted during the pandemic permanent parts of RI election law, using the same false narrative being used by the national GOP. CLICK HERE for details.
To stop this, Democrats are trying to enact a sweeping voting rights bill called the For the People Act, which protects voting, ends partisan gerrymandering, and keeps dark money out of elections. It already passed the House but Republicans in the Senate are fighting it with more lies.
On
Wednesday, the Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz falsely claimed the new bill
would register millions of undocumented immigrants to vote and accused
Democrats of wanting the most violent criminals to cast ballots too.
The
core message of the Republican party now consists of lies about a “crisis” of
violent immigrants crossing the border, lies that they’re voting illegally, and
blatantly anti-democratic restrictions on voting to counter these trumped-up
crises.
The
party that once championed lower taxes, smaller government, states’ rights and
a strong national defense now has more in common with anti-democratic regimes
and racist-nationalist political movements around the world than with America’s
avowed ideals of democracy, rule of law, and human rights.
Donald
Trump isn’t single-handedly responsible for this, but he demonstrated to the
GOP the political potency of bigotry and the GOP has taken him up on it.
This
transformation in one of America’s two eminent political parties has shocking
implications, not just for the future of American democracy but for the future
of democracy everywhere.
“I
predict to you, your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their
doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy?” Joe
Biden opined at his news conference on Thursday.
In
his maiden speech at the State Department on March 4,
Antony Blinken conceded that the erosion of democracy around the world is “also
happening here in the United States.”
The
secretary of state didn’t explicitly talk about the Republican Party, but there
was no mistaking his subject.
“When
democracies are weak … they become more vulnerable to extremist movements from
the inside and to interference from the outside,” he warned.
People
around the world witnessing the fragility of American democracy “want to see
whether our democracy is resilient, whether we can rise to the challenge here
at home. That will be the foundation for our legitimacy in defending democracy
around the world for years to come.”
That
resilience and legitimacy will depend in large part on whether Republicans or
Democrats prevail on voting rights.
Not
since the years leading up to the Civil War has the clash between the nation’s
two major parties so clearly defined the core challenge facing American
democracy.
Robert
Reich's latest book is "THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It." He
is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at
Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. He served as Secretary of Labor
in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the 10
most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written 17
other books, including the best sellers "Aftershock," "The Work
of Nations," "Beyond Outrage," and "The Common Good."
He is a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, founder of
Inequality Media, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and
co-creator of the award-winning documentaries "Inequality For All," streaming on YouTube, and "Saving Capitalism," now streaming on
Netflix.
