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February 19 - April 23, 2023
Democrats retained a firm grip in the House of Representatives with a 243-seat majority.
Although Reagan was able to pressure the House into moving forward with a major supply-side tax reduction in 1981, much of the rest of his legislative agenda stalled.
In 1982 the administration failed in its effort to reduce Social Security benefits.
The economic recession of 1982, which Democrats called the “Reagan Recession,” made his first midterms even harder than they normally were. After Reagan had promised that his tax cut would turn things around from the Carter era’s stagflation, the nation watched the unemployment rate go up, peaking at a whopping 10 percent.
Gingrich’s smashmouth style of partisanship became the norm.18
But the welfare state endured. Reagan worked with Democrats in 1983 on a deal that raised Social Security taxes to shore up the program’s finances. Federal spending reached 22.2 percent of GDP by 1983; it was 20.6 percent when he took office.
Means-tested programs provided higher benefits in 1990 than in 1982, including programs like Medicaid and food stamps, which didn’t garner much love from the Right.
Nor was supply-side economics working. The premise that tax breaks for wealthier Americans and businesses would eventually trickle down to the rest of the nation didn’t pan out. Instead, by the mid-1980s, economic inequality had become worse, and the deficit kept growing.
In 1986 Reagan worked with Democrats on a tax-reform package that closed loopholes benefiting corporate lobbyists. He also signed a major immigration-reform bill that offered amnesty to millions of undocumented persons.
Much of Reagan’s conservative agenda in the 1980s was achieved through presidential power. The president relied on a combination of executive orders—many of which undid workplace and environmental regulations from the 1960s and 1970s—
Inaction also could serve the conservative cause. As the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis unfolded, Reagan’s unwillingness to acknowledge the disease or to take any sort of action was in itself a proactive decision about what the government wouldn’t do.
Following the 1986 midterm elections, the administration was engulfed in a major scandal that some in the administration thought could result in impeachment. High-level national security officials had run an operation to illegally send money to the Nicaraguan Contras—despite the congressional prohibition on doing so—by using revenue from secret arms sales to Iran, then considered to be the number-one terrorist state.
In the end, Reagan’s biggest foreign policy success was to bring to fruition exactly what he spent most of his life working against—détente with the Soviet Union. Reagan and Gorbachev convened a number of high-level summits. One of the sticking points was Star Wars; Reagan insisted that the United States be allowed to continue the project.
the idea that there was a rightward revolution under way also helped to invigorate liberal opposition and activism.
The gay rights movement that had already taken form in the late 1960s gained strength when organizations formed to pressure the government into responding to the AIDS crisis.
Other progressive movements thrived as well. Feminist organizations enjoyed newfound support as Reagan’s stands enraged and galvanized a new generation of supporters.
Environmental organizations likewise expanded. The ferocity of the opposition to policies that were aimed to help business instead of the environment ended up strengthening the movement. The Sierra Club’s membership increased to 364,000 in 1985 from 181,000 in 1980.
The Reagan Revolution has been more of a political talking point than a description of reality.
Voter Fraud
But Trump’s claims that rampant voter fraud had stolen his electoral victory were, as one judge noted, based on “levels of hearsay” so “speculative” as to be “fantastical.”
Anyone familiar with Dinesh D’Souza 2000 mules?
the Big Lie still provided a handy excuse for Republicans in forty-eight states to propose nearly four hundred voter-suppression bills.
The Fifteenth Amendment made the traditional race-specified methods of disfranchisement unconstitutional.
Chrisman contended that it was the very presence of Black voters and their threat to the old antebellum order that had forced whites to commit fraud at the ballot box.
Remove African Americans from the electorate and “it would eliminate the need to rig elections.
in Mississippi in 1890, the “state’s voting-age population… was 271,080: 150,469 blacks and 120,611 whites.”
That led to the Mississippi Plan, a wave of disfranchising policies using racially targeted but race-neutral and Supreme Court–approved language, such as the poll tax and the literacy test, which devastated Black voter participation.
poll tax required a fee be paid, sometimes cumulative, sometimes years before the election, in order to vote. The literacy test made voters read sections of the state or US Constitution or correctly respond to any other test the registrar devised, such as “count the number of bubbles in a soap bar,” to be able to access the ballot box.
By 1940, only 3 percent of age-eligible African Americans were registered to vote in the South.
In the early 1960s, there were counties in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia that had single-digit percentages of African Americans on the voter rolls.
Republican city chairman Carl L. Shipley said that “Republican poll watchers would keep an eye out for ‘people who… are not the kind of people who would register and vote.’”
Therefore, the racialized lie of voter fraud had proven so politically useful that it survived the civil rights movement, even the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965), and thrived with the realignment of the parties as southern Democrats continued their migration into the Republican Party.32
Ronald Reagan, former governor of California and 1976 Republican candidate for president, declared that Carter’s proposals would bring the wrong people into the voting booth.
Reagan surmised that what the Democrats planned to do was flood the ballot box with votes from “the bloc comprised of those who get a whole lot more from the federal government in various kinds of income distribution
Paul Weyrich, who was a cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, gave a talk in 1980 where he laid out what would become the blueprint for GOP victory. He chastised the audience for believing in “Good Government” where they wanted “everybody to vote.” “Well, I don’t,” he said, because “our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
In the end, the Republicans got just what they paid for. But it wasn’t, despite the pretext, a cache of voter-fraud cases. In fact, the Ballot Security Task Force did not uncover a single instance of voter-registration fraud.
Through congressional hearings, media appearances, and DOJ-driven prosecutions, Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and “Thor” Hearne and his American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) amplified this fear of the mythical beast of fraudulent voters pillaging and plundering American democracy.
That act of integrity cost Iglesias his job. Legal scholar Michael Waldman drew a compelling analogy: “Firing a prosecutor for failing to find voter fraud is like firing a park ranger for failing to find Sasquatch.”
Seventh Circuit and the US Supreme Court, though acknowledging that there had not been one documented case of voter-impersonation fraud in the state’s history, ruled that the supposed burdens on minority voters to obtain those IDs could not outweigh Indiana’s vested interest in thwarting voter fraud.
There was Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was based on his 2016 claims that he would have won the popular vote if three to five million illegal votes had not been cast. That commission collapsed with nothing but blank pages in the section on voter fraud.
