I have to thank Governor Huckabee Sanders. No, not for they way she makes the phrases “legacy hire” and “MAGA toadie” fight to a draw in any honest bio. I spend a lot of time being disgusted by the GOP. When Sanders made news by trying to delay a special election for basically a full year, I was confused instead of disgusted, and it was a nice change of pace.

In a GOP-dominated state government, why would she try to abuse her gubernatorial discretion and put off replacing Republican state Senator Gary Stubblefield until after another entire legislative session had passed?

Turns out Governor Sanders has been hot to put a new 3,000-bed megaprison in the district that Stubblefield served. Now, even after Stubblefield has died, Sanders seems to prefer to not risk any such pesky pushback from a successor. So Plan A was to simply disenfranchise the entire district until she could railroad the jail into their area.

A constituent farmer has sued (successfully, so far) to stop Sanders’ shenanigans. The resident is named Colt Shelby — sharing his names with a gun and a car, which is how you know I’m not making this up.

Not that Sanders doesn’t need the jail space. This Ph.D. paper about the state’s “school to prison pipeline” shares the darkly entertaining graphic showing that the U.S. has an incarceration rate 5 times greater than the next founding NATO country, and that Arkansas’ incarceration rate is over 20% higher than the U.S. rate. I’m sure building the Big Lie and/or more prayer into their school curriculum will straighten everything right out.

Sorry, Norms Are For Democracies
Elsewhere, Indiana and Virginia are the latest states drawn into Trump’s project to save his House majority by trashing longstanding informal redistricting traditions and instigating state-by-state legislative combat to gerrymander every last seat available.

Let’s review the time-honored trifecta for preserving minority GOP rule: avoiding campaign finance reform, preserving gerrymandering as opposed to independent redistricting boards, and executing voter suppression tactics.

Well, and preserving the Electoral College, but that’d make a quadfecta.

Once-a-decade redistricting was one of the last semi-tacit agreements to avoid the chaos of ongoing state-level partisan redrawing of lines. But everything about the last part of that sentence is appealing for Trump, so here we are. Yes, it takes a sort of lizard brain to never, ever consider how trampling on various norms might come back to bite your party someday. But what does he care? He won’t be sweating those details, he’ll be on his personal retrofitted-by taxpayers jet between golf courses.

Disenfranchisement’s Final Frontier
Unless, of course, the Epstein files bring him down first. Which brings us to the coup de grâce of recent disenfranchisement: Paralyzing an entire branch of government and refusing to swear in an elected Congresswoman in order to keep those files (or whatever is left of them) hidden away.

That’s the signature achievement of Speaker Johnson thus far. It’s groundbreaking in the way that Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to hold a vote on Merrick Garland, and I did not expect that kind of oath-crapping to occur again at that level of authority. At least Mitch’s was a straight-up party-over-country move, downright noble compared to what Johnson is enabling.

In the meantime, the federal shutdown means the working poor and many others are about to start going hungry while millions of others get their health insurance premiums jacked up beyond reach. The wealthy will get by, but that’s nothing new. In the longest view of depressing voter turnout, the GOP is pleased to tilt the playing field in a game of attrition. It’s not really disenfranchisement if the voter is dead, is it?