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Three important political events came together last week in our partisan election-year battle for the future of American democracy. The good news is democracy’s winning. The big losers so far are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The most critical victory for American democracy and democracy worldwide was when both houses of Congress continued billions in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine that Trump’s pro-Putin House Republicans blocked for six months. Republicans were literally forcing Ukrainians to ration bullets as they fought for their lives against Russia’s invading army.
The other two political breakthroughs for democracy also were delayed by Republican partisans for as long as possible to benefit Trump.
The U.S. Supreme Court, with half of its rightwing majority justices appointed by Trump, waited until its final hearing day to consider Trump’s preposterous claim he had presidential immunity to commit as many crimes as he wanted without being prosecuted. Even Trump’s appointees know that’s absurd, but now they’ll wait several more months to issue their decision to prevent Trump from being prosecuted for his violent insurrection attempt to overthrow President Biden’s election and his theft of top-secret documents before November’s presidential election.
That’s why the start of Trump’s criminal trial before a New York jury last week for violating federal election laws to cover up payoffs to women in 2016 was important. Trump’s success in hiding his crimes as a candidate enabled him to commit far greater crimes as president.
Biden’s Victory
The most important victory for President Biden we all should be celebrating is winning strong support in both houses of Congress to provide more than $61 billion in military support to defend Ukraine’s democracy from the savage destruction of Putin’s deadly invasion. Biden and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate never stopped fighting for Ukraine even when Trump extremists in the House elected MAGA Mike Johnson as speaker. Johnson declared the Senate’s bipartisan foreign aid bill funding the wars in Ukraine and Israel and feeding starving Palestinians in Gaza “dead on arrival” in the House.
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Biden ultimately resurrected the entire foreign aid funding bill in both the House and Senate months after Trump thought he had killed it. The overwhelming vote was 311 to 112 in the House and 79 to 18 in the Senate.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson was one of the 18 pro-Putin Republican holdouts to vote against defending Ukraine. So did every Wisconsin Republican congressman except for Green Bay Congressman Mike Gallagher. Gallagher’s vote to fund democracy in Ukraine was one of his last votes before resigning from Congress, becoming one of at least 15 Republicans fleeing from the dysfunctional House of Representatives this year. Gallagher’s seat will be vacant until November leaving Republicans with a one-vote House majority. A special election this week to fill a vacancy in a Democratic congressional district in New York will leave the political parties evenly divided in the House for at least a month.
Turn Out and Vote
The narrow political division has made it impossible for Johnson to pass any legislation at all in the House without Democratic votes. That’s what gave Biden and the Democrats the leverage over Johnson to force the vote on providing billions of dollars to rearm Ukraine with sophisticated military weapons to repel Putin’s assault on their nation.
A surprising number of elected Republicans openly defied Trump by taking a stand against Putin’s deadly destruction to wipe President Volodymyr Zelensky’s freedom fighters off the face of the earth. It shows they realize an overwhelming majority of Americans don’t admire Putin’s ruthless political control of human beings nearly as much as Trump and MAGA Republicans do.
Many of the Republicans who will be sharing the ballot with Trump in November including all those Wisconsin House members who did Trump’s bidding by voting against defending Ukraine from Putin have built their conservative political careers on hatred of communism.
Embarrassing details from Trump’s co-conspirators are already reaching voters from his only criminal trial so far about the “fake news” disinformation network created to hide Trump’s crimes and release a flood of lies about anyone opposing him.
Lifelong Republican voters who have always believed in democracy don’t really want to live under Trump as a dictator even for a single day. I reconnected with one of them from high school who says the idea makes him sick to his stomach. That’s why political polls in every national election since 2018 have underestimated the vote for democracy from Americans. But we also know presidential elections are not decided under our Constitution by a majority of the American voters.
This year’s presidential election will be decided by the archaic electoral college system in the Constitution by the voters in half a dozen closely divided battleground states. Wisconsin is one of them. That’s why Wisconsin has to turn out every vote it can from voters who support democracy. That’s all America needs to survive.
