New Democratic governor in Kentucky faces GOP attempts to strip his power [View all]

Republicans at the state level of government are prioritizing maintaining their own power over any commitment to representative democracy just as much as their fellow party members in Washington DC have been.

The GOP has been remarkably adept at winning state elections during the past couple of decades, and they have proceeded to use the levers of power they control in state legislatures to gerrymander electoral districts to ensure their hold on majorities in the states where they control all the branches of local government.

While courts have finally begun to reverse the manipulated majority-ensuring districts to more accurately reflect the percentages of people voting statewide for each party and level the laying field for opposition candidates, the Republicans have continued to use other tactics to unethically maintain their electoral advantages, including voter suppression moves like limiting or eliminating early voting, closing polling places in heavily Democratic areas — making for more inconvenient travel to the ballot box and longer lines once people arrive there — and refusing to replace unsecured electronic voting machines with unhackable hand-marked paper ballots.

The political sentiment over Republican policies at the state level has begun to change during the Trump era, following the disastrous proof of the failure of the GOP’s mantra of small government — and even smaller taxes — in states like Kansas where the Republicans’ experiment with supply-side, trickle-down financial policy failed so miserably that it’s a wonder that it didn’t permanently put a stake through the heart of that public-resource-sucking concept.

Read more: https://washingtonpress.com/2019/11/26/new-democratic-governor-in-kentucky-faces-gop-attempts-to-strip-his-power/