Gradually, minority rule has strengthened its grip on Arizona and America.
This didnโt start with overturning Roe vs. Wade โ thatโs just the latest and best example.
Itโs been happening regularly in elections, lawmaking and, yes, court decisions for years. Fridayโs Supreme Court ruling was just an especially powerful reminder that weโre an admirably diverse country and state governed increasingly by a minority of politically conservative Christian activists, especially on the court.
The result of their rise is that the rest of us โ not just liberals and Democrats, but everyone outside the conservative Christian fold โ are, functionally, lesser citizens. Our votes and our opinions count for less. They are the self-described โreal Americansโ with full rights; we are lesser Americans with diminished rights.
That seems most obvious in the case of Roe vs. Wade. Before Fridayโs ruling, polls consistently showed that more than 60% of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned, and that large majorities support abortion rights in all or most cases.
But set aside womenโs rights to control their own bodies and destinies. Think about a slightly less potent issue โ school vouchers.
This is an idea with origins in the backlash to racial desegregation in the South in the 1950s. After the Supreme Court struck down โseparate but equalโ public schooling, Southern states established โsegregation academiesโ โ private, segregated schools. White families could leave the newly desegregated public schools and pay for the private schooling with a new system of taxpayer-funded โvouchers.โ
Libertarians such as Milton Friedman embraced the idea, and it has been popular among Christian conservatives โ both Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists โ for decades. Itโs a way to fund religious schools with public money and draw more students to their religious instruction.
In Arizona, the Republican majority in Arizonaโs Legislature has been trying to expand our limited voucher program for years. The existing vouchers, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, would have eventually been made available to all Arizona students under a law passed in 2017.
Public school advocates collected enough signatures to force a referendum on the bill in 2018. And that year, Arizona voters rejected the program by a 65% to 35% margin. Our collective opinion of the idea was clear.
Public money for religion
GOP legislators have a tiny majority in the current session โ 31 to 29 in the House and 16 to 14 in the Senate. But that did not stop them from passing an even more sweeping voucher program to close out the legislative session last week.
Unlike the 2017 bill, HB 2853 would open up Arizonaโs voucher program to everyone right away. If signed into law, it could lead to a dismantlement of Arizonaโs public-education system, by passing unknown millions of dollars from public schools to private religious schools instead.
Some legislators excused returning to this rejected idea just four years after the 2018 rejection by saying that the pandemic changed some peopleโs minds about vouchers. Maybe some, sure, but come on โ not enough to overcome a 30-point margin.
Itโs another effort at minority rule. And itโs being supported by this same U.S. Supreme Court.
The court ruled Tuesday that Maine may not withhold vouchers from โsectarianโ religious schools. In other words, if states are going to give out vouchers for private schools, they may not exclude schools that promote religious faiths.
In its ruling the court favored the Constitutionโs freedom of religion over the prohibition against establishment of a state religion. The result: not only may Maine fund religious schools with public money, but it must do so.
No democracy at all
As it stands, Americans who are not Christian conservatives donโt count for as much. Weโre like 4/5 of an American. Conservative Christians count for like 6/5 of an American.
You see this in the effort by Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 elections.
Trump had lost the popular vote in 2016 by 65.8 million to 63 million. But our anti-majoritarian Electoral College system produced his minority rule.
Then in 2020, Trump lost by a wider margin, 81.3 million to 74.2 million. In Arizona and around the country, post-election studies have revealed why: Many people who voted for Republicans down the ballot voted against Trump at the top, or didnโt vote for president at all.
But Trump has found strong support for the pathetic denial of his loss. Some would rather have no democracy at all than a democracy governed by Americans who donโt view the world like them.
Now, when I talk about โdemocracyโ and โmajority rule,โ some people are quick to retort that โWeโre a republic, not a democracyโ and โDemocracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner.โ
But thatโs neither our system nor our situation at all. Our Constitution establishes a republic that is also a representative democracy and that rightfully protects minority and individual rights. Combined with ruthless politics, though, it has produced minority rule.
How? In the case of the Supreme Court, itโs really as simple as this: Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, blocked any vote on Merrick Garlandโs nomination to the Supreme Court in the last year of Barack Obamaโs presidency, 2016, saying the nomination was too close to the election, though it was months away.
Then he pushed through the nomination of Trump pick Amy Coney Barrett just eight days before the Nov. 3, 2020 election. The 52 Republican senators who voted to confirm Coney Barrett represented about 16 million fewer Americans than the 47 Democrats and one Republican who voted against her confirmation.
The ruthless politics went further. Two of Trumpโs three nominees to the court, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, apparently lied in their nomination hearings that they considered Roe v. Wade settled precedent.
Pack the court
Similar ruthlessness has occurred in Arizona. Gov. Doug Ducey and legislative Republicans engineered the expansion and packing of the Arizona Supreme Court, against the wishes of the court itself. Now the court is made up of six Republicans and one libertarian independent, Clint Bolick, who leans Republican.
The lesson from the success of this ruling Christian-conservative minority is for the majorities on these issues to pursue our political goals just as single-mindedly and ruthlessly.
If Democrats can expand the U.S. Supreme Court, they should, with no apologies needed or offered. If they can codify abortion rights, gay marriage or the right to contraception, they should.
In Arizona, we are obligated to fight to reject vouchers through a referendum again, but maybe we could reject universal vouchers in the state constitution through a ballot issue.
Itโs good that our system protects minority rights, but it is untenable when it produces minority rule on these momentous social issues.
