Opinion | Republicans’ Anti-Woke, Anti-Vote Crusade Has Crashed Into the Constitution

Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade — revived and revitalized — that was anti-woke and anti-vote.

Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors’ offices.

If they couldn’t control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans’ lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities — between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.

The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.

In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.

In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created “new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths.” He said that the bill positioned “the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts,” which he called a “vast government overreach.”

Hutchinson — now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate — seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare “death panels” would.

Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governor’s veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.

Across states, we’re seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semi-fascist federalism is being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.

This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are “likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.”

Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.

Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of “Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures,” a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would “suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.”

On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.

This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure “reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.”

The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldn’t care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.

The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws aren’t constitutional absolutists; they’re constitutional opportunists.

The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.

They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.

But again, the judiciary — in this case, the Supreme Court — has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisiana’s congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous “independent state legislature” theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.

This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.

The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.

In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, “We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.”

The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, “We reaffirm the Constitution’s fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law.” (The party didn’t even produce a new platform in 2020.)

Those declarations were never wholly true, but now they’re a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.