All signs now point to a full-court press by the GOP to rig state election rules in a bid to stay in power permanently. So far, Democrats have barely put up a fight.

Last week, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson appeared on local radio to declare his “loss of confidence” in the state’s elections commission and assert the need for its legislature to take control of future elections.

The context for Johnson’s remarks is important, coming as they do in the wake of a nonpartisan report that found no significant evidence of fraud during the 2020 election — the upshot being that if actual evidence of foul play cannot be found, Republican lawmakers will simply continue to assert that it has occurred as a pretext for continuing to meddle with election rules. Johnson’s intervention also follows a Republican-led push for a partisan redistricting of the state that passed its senate earlier this month.

Taken together, both represent different thrusts in a wider GOP strategy to consolidate power by rewriting election laws and empowering state legislatures to toss out results in future contests. The two efforts are, of course, mutually reinforcing. With greater control of state legislatures, Republicans wield more power to rewrite rules and redraw district boundaries, thus ensuring false majorities that will, in turn, be empowered to act in the GOP’s favor in the event of future disputes in presidential elections — particularly if the results are close.

While one of America’s two major political parties is engaged in a concerted effort to rig future elections in its favor, its supposedly reform-minded, liberal alternative consistently refuses to do much more than issue dire rhetorical warnings about the Republican menace while precluding or dismissing the kinds of actions that logically follow from them.

The picture is, to say the least, pretty bleak…

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