Terry Bracy: Keeping the Republic, if we can

Richard Gephardt is worried. The former Congressional Majority Leader and presidential candidate believes the usual menu of issues like the economy and foreign policy are outweighed this time by the very survival of the American system. Gephardt is joined by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and business leaders on a board aptly named Keep our Republic, in reference to Ben Franklin’s famous observation that we have a republic “if we can keep it.”

In a recent interview for this column, Gephardt issued this warning: “So many candidates asserting today that our electoral process is corrupt, without factual proof, is causing millions of Americans to mistrust our electoral process. If enough citizens believe the process is corrupt, self-governance is doomed.” The only option then is authoritarianism, which Donald Trump has delivered to our doorstep.

If the past is prologue, we know what lies ahead if Trump and his January 6th thugs lose the election. Across the country, and especially in swing states like Arizona, they are busy constructing roadblocks to a clean election. And threatening violence as the price of losing.

In an earlier column, I described the MAGA strategy. First, Republican-dominated Legislatures, under the guise of protecting the vote, have taken steps to make voting harder by requiring voters to carry unnecessary paperwork and sharply limiting the use of drop boxes. Second, they planted Trump acolytes on election boards and, in the case of Georgia, empowered each member to raise illegitimate concerns about the count to delay unfavorable results. Third, they have employed hundreds of lawyers and bullies to occupy voting sites to intimidate non-white voters and slow the lines, a practice I encountered and fought decades ago in a heavily Hispanic precinct in South Phoenix. Fourth, they will flood the courts with lawsuits in the hope that a friendly judge somewhere will validate a claim, throwing rocks into the election machinery. The endgame is either to send the election to the House of Representatives, where the small states will prevail, or to put the result, as in 2000, in the hands of an outspokenly partisan Supreme Court.

The American Conservative Union recently claimed that monitoring drop boxes with off-duty sheriffs’ deputies would simply assure that collection points are not fraudulently employed. Not according to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. “The whole thing is an absurd sham to cover up direct efforts to intimidate voters by a bunch of CPAC-recruited vigilantes,” he said. He pointed out that drop boxes in Arizona are located in public buildings or polling locations that are carefully monitored. Against this tornado of lies and electoral destruction, there are four responses.

• First, the Democratic Party must nominate, as it has, a winning ticket.
• Second, we must call upon American voters to exercise the franchise with courage and commitment. Like schoolyard bullies, they only win when we fail to confront them.
• Third, election officials must stand their ground in the face of unprecedented intimidation tactics.

Already earning our respect are two Arizonans — Fontes and Kris Mayes, the remarkably effective Attorney General who recently indicted 18 in the 2020 election interference case. Finally, if we have the time and resources, we should support the bipartisan Keep Our Republic (keepourrepublic.org) that is organizing in all the swing states to fight election interference. Congressman Gephardt sees it as a “bipartisan group of citizens in local communities to be a citizen’s firewall against unconventional threats to having valid, trusted elections.”

Winston Churchill famously said that “America always does the right thing, after exhausting every other possibility.” Churchill was a keen observer of American culture and politics and there is no doubt he would have been on needles and pins with respect to what is happening to our country now. Let’s hope that the America Churchill esteemed and pulled for turns out to vote in November and reveals itself closer to Gephardt’s vision than the toxic alternative. History hangs in the balance.